Valuing Difference Through Type with Sue Blair

April 19, 2022

Personality type as a guide to understanding yourself and valuing different ways of operating and living.

Welcome to Episode 15 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Valuing Difference Through Type

I’m joined by Sue Blair – Personality Type Coach & Educator, Author, Speaker and Resource Creator.

We chat about Sue’s 20 plus year passion for personality and psychological type and how she works with educators, parents, careers advisors, young people and type practitioners to communicate type concepts clearly and simply as a guide for living and decision-making. Sue has ESTJ preferences – so is extraverted and sensing in preference. With a focus on introversion and intuiting in our chats and guest profiles so far in the podcast, you’ll notice the difference in style chatting with Sue! We explore extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting and valuing differences in people and ourselves through type.

You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

Parenting children who have very different personality types
How type can help educators, parents and young people
Offering choices for different personalities in educational contexts
Lenses of type: Cognitive Processes, Temperament and Interaction Styles.
‘Simplexity’ as Sue’s signature style in type work
Common misconceptions about introverts and extraverts
Being extraverted in preference including in covid times
Differences between Sensing and Intuiting preferences.
How type helps you be comfortable in yourself and value difference
Reframing Imposter Syndrome and self-doubt

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 15 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 19th of April as I record this.

II’m excited to have Sue Blair, Personality Type Coach and Educator, Speaker, Author and Resource Creator join us for the podcast today. More on Sue and our conversation in a moment.

But first, I want to share a personal update and an exciting new program open for enrolment now. I’ve been busy shaping up The Writing Road Trip community writing program I’m leading with my writing partner Beth Cregan. We kick off on 2 May for 6 months of writing together and enrolment is open now if you want to join in. There’s an early bird 10% off now before Thursday 21 April, 9am AEST so if you’re listening before then, take advantage of that. The Writing Road Trip focuses on accountability, community and support to help you write what’s in your heart with the companionship of others. We’ve shaped up a program based on what worked to help us write our books and we know it will help you with your writing practice. Plus we’ll have a ton of fun along the way. You can find out more here:

Find out more about The Writing Road Trip

Now onto today’s fabulous conversation with Sue Blair. Sue has been working with psychological type for 20 years. She is an international presenter and keynote speaker, as well as a qualified MBTI practitioner and adult educator. She is the author of The Personality Puzzle coaching cards, now used worldwide by coaches and counsellors. She has taught thousands of teachers, parents, students and businesses about the importance of self-awareness and communication. Sue is the recipient of the APTi 2015 Gordon Lawrence Award. This award recognises an outstanding achievement to the field of education.

Sue and I met as fellow psychological type practitioners through the Australian Association for Psychological Type. New Zealand based, Sue is a valuable and sought-after contributor to international conferences and forums on psychological type. I’ve had the pleasure of attending several workshops and conference presentations led by Sue. They are always immense fun and incredibly practical. Sue’s teaching and sharing about personality work is characterised by strong roots in educational work, use of images and graphics such as through her Personality Puzzle coaching cards and stunningly clear descriptions about personality types. And with more than 20 years’ experience in the field, all her work is enriched by deep knowledge and experience.

Sue has ESTJ preferences so is Extraverted and a Sensing in preference and with many Introverts and Intuitives, like me on the show so far, I was keen to explore different preferences in conversations with guests. We focus on this and on personality preferences generally and how they play out in practice to value difference in all kinds of ways in this episode.

I hope it inspires you to explore more about how personality insights can help you with self-leadership and self-knowledge.

So let’s head into the interview with Sue.

Transcript of interview with Sue Blair

Terri Connellan: Hello Sue and welcome to the Create Your Story podcast.

Sue Blair: Hi Terri, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Terri Connellan: Thank you for your connection. And I can’t wait to explore more about you and about psychological type today. So we’ve connected in many ways around personality and psychological type as part of AusAPT the Australian Association for Psychological Type and the global type community. And it’s great to be able to share those conversations. So can you provide a brief overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work that you do now.

Sue Blair: Yes, absolutely. So, way back a while ago, I was born in London. I am the youngest of five. And, we’ll come onto this later, but I am the only extrovert in the whole family. I have a twin sister who is my absolute opposite in type. My preferences are ESTJ. My lovely twin sister is INFP. I started out business wise in the travel industry and really enjoyed it. That’s something that came very easily to me. I worked in business travel. It seemed to suit all of my requirements, meet my needs, got into management and into sales and was a sales manager for quite a while before I then stopped to have children.

So I met and married my lovely husband, John, who has ENTP preferences. We actually met commuting on the underground. Clearly being an ENTP, he wasn’t following any of the rules that you don’t speak to anybody on the underground and somehow or other, we got to be married and 33 years later, we still are. So, always an interesting experience to marry someone who’s totally your opposite, but a good learning opportunity, I think.

So we moved to New Zealand 25 years ago. I moved with an 18 month old and then had my son James here. So we have two children Louisa, who has ISTJ preferences and James who is ENTP. So not a huge amount of diversity in the family, but my goodness, parenting those two incredibly different children was what really got me into psychological type.

I found out about it through doing a parenting course when I was in New Zealand and it completely resonated with me and I kind of got well, would obsessed be the right word? I’m not entirely sure, but I just thought this is the most helpful thing that I have ever discovered about parenting. And it’s so clear to me that I had these two children who were different and if I parented them the same, then things were going to go downhill rather quickly.

So Louisa, unsurprisingly was somewhat more like me, although that difference between extroversion and introversion was very clear from the outset. And then parenting James, I just had to learn a whole new set of skills.

And so getting them through the school system was also very, very different. Louisa was born for school. She accelerated herself. She was just like a pig in mud really. She was happy other than socially, sometimes she found it difficult. And James was just a square peg in a round hole. And we just had to get him through, those 13 years until he exited and is now doing very well, thankfully.

But it was that experience, that personal experience that really introduced me to type, and I can remember going to a workshop, a Myers-Briggs workshop and listening to a really lovely woman presenting on time and just sitting there going, I want to do what she’s doing. And eventually I did get to do that, but not necessarily in the corporate world. Yes. I have gone back to the corporate world and done a lot of work with teams and that’s a place that I feel very happy. But I really did want to use type to help parents, to help young people, to help teachers, to help educators. Because it was really difficult. It was a real challenge to get an ENTP through school, my ENTP through school.

And so really I’d like to alleviate some of the headaches and just help people understand that people are going to learn differently. And that means that you can make that journey a lot easier. So I now work with teachers, with educators. I’ve done a lot of work with teenagers, helping them understand themselves, and more recently working a lot with careers advisers in schools, because I really do believe that we’ve got a lot of young people who are making choices that are not as well informed as they could be.

So the work that I’ve been doing has been in educating the careers advisors within the school or university environment to say include this. But this is not the only thing that you need to know, but please include something on personality types so that the young people who you are working with get an understanding of themselves and why either a job environment might suit them or not, or why a particular career option that they’re looking at might suit them or not. Bearing in mind that we’re not matching a career with a type. You know, we’re not saying that people of this type can only do this sort of career. The world is your oyster in many, many ways.

But it is absolutely necessary to see the essence of somebody. And just say, let’s just discuss this and maybe look at some other options. So it opens up the conversation as soon as a young person feels that they’ve got that self-awareness piece in mind.

Terri Connellan: That’s fascinating. And it’s always amazing to hear how people’s life experiences have taken them down a path and into their passions. And your work really focuses in educational contexts obviously from the expriences that you’ve been through, working with teachers, working with students, working with teenagers and career advisors. So can you tell our listeners a little bit more about this work and the value of type in these contexts, cause I’m sure there’s just so much value for people in educational contexts.

Sue Blair: Absolutely. I really love working with educators and I’ve worked with them at all sorts of different levels going from early childhood through primary, through to high school and in almost every setting, as soon as we start talking about personality type, they just look at me aghast and they just start saying, why did we not learn this at our teacher’s education college? What was missing? This is an enormous piece of the puzzle that was missing. And I think they’re absolutely right.

It really is the case that you have to know the people who you are speaking to, or at least understand difference. So what we are not saying, you know, obviously in a high school context, it gets even more difficult at the younger years, it’s a little bit easier. But we are not saying that you have to teach to everyone’s personality type a hundred percent of the time, but you have to offer choices within the classroom that is going to appeal to all students at some point in time.

And it is definitely the case that they often learn most, in some cases, from doing something that doesn’t fit their natural style. But unless they’ve got that knowledge that some of the time their needs are going to be met, then they can find the learning environment very difficult indeed. So it’s a question of offering choices.

What does that mean to both the educators and to the students, but also a lot of the time, we’re looking at team-building within schools because teachers work in clusters and more and more now we have the modern learning environment. And that means that teachers are working very closely together. So I do work closely with my local primary school, where both my children went to school and they now have a modern learning environment where they’ve got three teachers who have 90 children for the year.

And that means that it’s far harder for them to know how the child is progressing all of the time. They can manage 30 children and they get to know them throughout the year. Really getting the same level of connection with 90 children is not that possible. And also to be able to connect well, and work well with the other teachers who are working in that same situation. So how they get on, what their personalities are, how they can really leverage each other’s strengths and understand that you don’t have to be good at everything. You can have some gaps, you can have some holes, but if they work in a team where they’ve got multiple preferences, then you can really work together, everybody working to their strengths and everybody having a trust in each other that they can ask for help.

So I spent quite a lot of my time doing that as well. So it’s not just, how do you teach a child who’s different to me, but how do we get on as adults and also, how do we manage? One of the things that I find working in corporate life is that there are plenty of people who are given training on managing your staff, but nobody or very rarely are you given some training on how to manage up. How do you actually manage your boss? Because your boss is one of the most important peoples in your life. The person who is managing you, you need that connection to go well. So how does that look? And how can I make some changes? What sort of perspective shifts can I make in order to make that relationship work?

And that’s the same in schools or in corporate or in families. Everywhere you go, your personality is your permanent companion and you carry it with you wherever you go. So. Yeah, being able to cut and paste to different situations is really important.

Terri Connellan: Yes. And I’ve had the great opportunity of attending workshops with you and had so much value from those workshops, particularly where you’ve emphasized the three lenses of type, the idea of cognitive processes, temperament and interaction styles and also the fantastic visual resources that you use.

All of the things that you mentioned, it’s about understanding ourselves, but it’s how we work with others, how we work with our children and how we work with children as teachers, how we manage up and absolutely that understanding your boss, understanding how your team works. All of those are just such critical life skills. I agree. And why did we not learn this? is absolutely a question I’ve asked myself too. So, and you also said early on, it’s like a piece of the puzzle missing. Is that why you called your cards Personality Puzzle?

Sue Blair: I guess it was in a way, other than there’s a beautiful alliteration having Personality Puzzles. But you know what? I was sort of thinking about names and I was like, puzzling it through and I was thinking, okay, this seems like a good way to go because it is. Every family unit is different. Every working unit is different. And I’ve been doing this work, for 20 years plus, and I’m not bored with it yet because there’s always a different puzzle. There’s always something else that you haven’t sort of considered so yeah, probably.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And I had a chat with Joe Arrigo, who I know you also know, recently. He talked about in coaching, he sees personality as a puzzle, he said not to be solved, but a puzzle to sort of put the pieces together.

Sue Blair: Absolutely. And you mentioned there those three lenses, which I think are invaluable. So having the cognitive processes, temperament and interaction styles, I consider them as being a bit like spinning plates. You know, when I’m doing some coaching with someone. I’m like, have I have, I twizzled that plate? Have I gone through all three? And you’re just gathering the information and then coaching in relation to what you’re hearing, but definitely using those three elements of type, those three perspectives, I find incredibly helpful.

Terri Connellan: They’re so valuable. So how would you describe your signature style in your personality type work?

Sue Blair: I often use a word that I kind of made up, which is ‘simplexity’. And I rather like it because it really, I think puts across the fact that we have to make things simple.

You know, if we’re going to get to speak to people who are not type practitioners, then we have to make it as simple as possible. But I certainly want to honor the complexity of the model. You know, we are all very complex people. We are all this dynamic and incredible mixture of physics, chemistry, and biology. We are complex human beings. The human brain is the most complex thing on the planet, so many people say.

But trying to make it simple, I think as an ESTJ, my type preferences are pretty unusual in the type community. When I go to type conferences, probably 10 or 20% of people have a sensing preference and I love hanging out with you intuiting guys. I think you’re fabulous. I love the way that you think about things and you explore and you’re so curious about everything. But my goodness, you can make things complicated from time to time.

So I think my role within the type community is one that can just get through some of that, make things more simple, use a process to help people understand that involves grounded descriptions, communication style that is perhaps more direct. And getting to the point quickly. Because we haven’t got time. We are all time poor. So the more we can make the most of the time then, hopefully I provide resources that allow people to do that.

Terri Connellan: Oh, you absolutely do. And I mentioned your Personality Puzzle and Type Trilogy cards as we’ve talked and they’re fantastic resources because they’re very visual and they do make the complex clearer. And, when I’m coaching, if I’m working with a client, I grab those cards. I have them around me as resources to prompt me, which I find really helpful. And yeah, they’re great. And your LinkedIn posts that you’ve done recently are just fabulous. You look like you’re really enjoying that social media work.

Sue Blair: Well, the first time in my life, I can actually say that I am enjoying social media and I have to thank Joe Arrigo for that who got me onto it. Because I was just wondering, what do you do with this? How do you communicate with the world about something that you find that so important without kind of being too salesy. And he really got me into this frame of mind that you just share what you know, and I’ve just been really happy doing that. I’m not trying to sell anybody, anything. I might mention a few things that I’m involved with, but you know, after 20 years of trying to put across this message on type, I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.

And I’ve just thoroughly enjoyed on a weekly basis, putting some information out there that has been something that I’ve learnt along the way. And I’ve been to what I have been to dozens of type conferences by now, which are all fantastic. I enjoy it. If I come away with three or four things that I’ve learnt, that I can describe a bit differently then it’s just a wonderful experience.

And just being with a whole group of type enthusiasts is fantastic. So I’ve just thoroughly enjoyed sharing that and getting the comments back. It’s been a joy and a pleasure, I have to say.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it’s been really well-received. And Sue you have preferences for extroversion. Can you explain what this means in practice and how it plays out in your life?

Sue Blair: Absolutely. I think it certainly was striking. As I mentioned to you before I come from a largish family, there’s five children and my two parents and I am the only extrovert in the family. I’m in my fifties now. But it was just a few years ago that my mum said to me, you know, that must have been quite difficult for you. Yeah, it really was. I went out a lot. I had a fairly quiet sort of cerebral household that I came back to. And I’d walk through the door and go, Ooh, I’m home. And there was this sort of collective rolling of eyes. Yeah, you came through the door and the rest of us knew about it. So that’s been interesting and also, raising a highly introverted child, my daughter, Louisa has been a really interesting experience too. And as I mentioned again, before my twin sister has preferences for introversion.

So, how it plays out in my life is, it didn’t take me long to realise that I needed that need met hugely. I think it allows me to understand that that is not something that I can let go of, that I do need to communicate with other people. I do need connection with other people and I’ve needed it all my life. You know, this is something that has never changed.

Even though I’m working from home a lot, sometimes I’m working by myself, I do organize my day so that I can get that need met in any way that I can. Often it is just going for walks. It’s just connecting up with people. If I look over my week, I’ve got meetings, I’ve got people I’m seeing, I’ve got things I’m doing. And you know, there’s wonderful occasions where I’m doing workshops, which is fantastic. I get my tank filled on a regular basis. But I understand it. I think I’ve also got a bit of a handle on when I’m too much. I do sort of have this understanding that, there are times when I need to sort of stop now and just quieten down a bit.

When I go to see my sister, it’s quite funny, an INFP and her partner is an INTP and they have a lovely quiet life together in a very small village in England. And I stayed with them for a week. And I think I knew more people in the village at the end of the week than they’d known living there for three years. But they’re also very appreciative of my need and they love me arriving, but I’m pretty sure when I go, it’s, ‘okay well, we got through that little sort of hurricane that just came through our house.’

Terri Connellan: So it must have been difficult as a person with extroverted preferences over the past two years with COVID impacts. So how was that for you and how did type insights help you navigate these times?

Sue Blair: Oh I think I have never been more thankful for understanding type. So my situation was possibly somewhat extreme in many ways. So I visited my elderly parents who both live on the small island of Alderney in the Channel Islands, which is an English island, but just off the coast of France. And I was visiting my parents who are in their nineties. This was in March of 2020, and basically I got stuck there. So they needed some assistance at the time. And we got to the point where covid was shutting everything down. And in New Zealand, either you got back by the 31st of March, or you had no idea how long you’d be away for. The whole place was sort of shutting.

And it wasn’t possible for me to leave. My parents needed me at that point in time. And so I said, I can’t go, I’ll have to stay here. Anyway, I was on the island for five months. So this was tricky in many ways. I didn’t have my usual routine. I didn’t have structured.

In fact, out of any of the needs that you could possibly think of that an ESTJ might need, absolutely all of them were taken away. So I couldn’t work at pace. I couldn’t be productive doing my own work. I was looking after my parents and I have to say, I do adore my parents, the pace was glacial. It was so slow.

Terri Connellan: And it’s not a big island, is it?

Sue Blair: It’s a very, very small island and I walked every single inch of it. I paced around the island every afternoon, while they were resting. And yeah, it was a difficult time. Not only that, but I had no idea what my future was, as far as, when I’d be able to leave or would I be there for months? Would I be there for years? This was the time we had no vaccines. We had no idea how, how long this was going to be going on for. So nothing was available that gave me any sort of security.

It was an extremely difficult time, but again, understanding type, I got my needs met. I got involved with the type community who were fabulous as support people. I went walking on the island everyday and found a lovely lady who I’m still friendly with today. We used to go walking literally for hours at two o’clock every afternoon. So I could do everything that I needed to do at my parents’ place. And then I had this lovely person to go walking with for two hours every day. And we did, we just walked for miles and miles and miles. And so we were definitely therapy for each other.

So that was great, but I knew what was difficult. I knew what I needed to do to try and cope with it. Most certainly my experience wasn’t the worst experience in the covid scenario. We were all well and covid didn’t hit the island very badly at all. And so, we were fine. We were safe. So that was one of the things. One of my core needs was met, but challenging in many ways. Yeah. And even recently in 2021, just last year, my city Auckland was locked down for a hundred days. And again, sometimes you feel you’ve pivoted so much you’re pirouetting around the place.

But by then I was back at home. So that was a little bit easier. So I got to have more of my normal things around me. Yeah. But definitely I think covid pulled the strings on extroversion far more than perhaps the introverts. Again, my twin sister was gleeful.

Terri Connellan: Yes. We’re both introverts in our house and we’ve been quite happily ensconced.

Sue Blair: She was completely content. It was almost like her whole life had been validated. Stay in. Thank you! Work by yourself. Again, tick! So everything she needed was provided and everything I needed sort of wasn’t.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it must’ve been super challenging. So what would you say as some of the common misconceptions about extroversion and introversion?

Sue Blair: I think the key one is this idea that extroverts are always sociable and introverts are always shy. Obviously, we each need to have a little bit of our other preference. There are times when I certainly enjoy my sociability. I really enjoy connecting with other people. It’s something that I sort of like about myself, but I need time by myself. Yeah. I really do, but not as much. I think there is a time and energy component to both of those preferences.

Those with a preference for introversion again, then they’re not always shy. I know introverts who say to me that they don’t have a shy bone in their body. And I believe them. I really do, but they need an exit strategy for when things become a little bit overwhelming. And they can get overwhelmed by a social event, way more quickly than I can.

So I think for extroverts, we don’t need to conserve our energy in the same way that introverts do. We get our energy from being out and about. It is exhausting for somebody with a preference for extroversion to spend all day by themselves. In the same way that it is exhausting for somebody with a preference for introversion to be out connecting all day. You know, you need a break after that. We need a break after having time by ourselves. So that time and energy component I think is really, really important. And I think it is the most misunderstood thing about extroverts and introverts. You know, we are not all one and none of the other. We are a lovely company.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And you explained that beautifully in your recent LinkedIn post, which I’ll link to in the show notes about solar versus battery energy. That was a a beautiful analogy.

Sue Blair: Yeah. Extroverts are solar powered. We literally do just get our energy back from being out there in the world and that battery power, that resource, that inner resource that you go into, that introspection that you get your energy back from is very different. And understanding that, appreciating that with the people we live with, people we’re raising, people we work with, in all contexts.

Terri Connellan: Just as in the renewable energy, well, we need both of those aspects of energy. We need both those in our community, a great analogy. You have preferences for sensing also as opposed to intuiting. And this is probably one of the aspects of type that are perhaps harder to understand, I think, than some of the others. So can you explain these preferences, sensing and intuiting, for gathering information in different ways?

Sue Blair: Sure. I think if you have a sensing preference that your mind is far more converging than it is diverging. You think of an idea and you zero in on it. If you think about going into zoom and you’re looking on zoom and then you zoom in further and you zoom in further and you zoom in further and you go, aha. That’s where I need to go. The sensing brain does that naturally, whereas the intuiting brain is very much more divergent. It just has this natural outward curiosity to it.

So the sensing brain looks at the real, looks at the tangible, looks at what is, and, and really has a joy of that. And the intuitive brain looks at the possible, looks at the patterns looks at what could be. And I’m often talking to people about creativity because some people seem to think that those within intuiting preference have sort of got a monopoly on creativity and that isn’t the case at all.

Those were the sensing preference can really have a huge amount of creativity within them, but they use reality as a spring board to go to these different places. But let’s gather the information first and then we can just launch ourselves off, into all sorts of different spaces, but ground me first. And those with an intuitive preference, the imagination is the tool that they use by which they can craft their reality and know what to do next.

So it’s sort of going outwards, for those who have a sensing preference from base upwards and outwards. And it’s the opposite way for those, with an intuitive preference. You just see that sort of big picture and then you just wriggle around in your mind to get to, okay, so what does that mean right now? Diverge, converge.

Terri Connellan: Yes, I can certainly relate to that with my partner Keith who is ISTJ. So he has sensing preferences and I have intuiting and the times I notice that is when he’ll ask me a question and then I will tell him all these different things that relate to it. And he’ll say, no, I just asked this question. I just went through, but it’s yeah, it’s that meandering that to me is obvious, like, it’s that relates to that. Whereas he goes, no, I just want this fact.

Sue Blair: Yeah. And also I think the surprising thing for those of us who have a sensing preference is how many different interpretations you can make from one single sentence. You know, it’s just, I didn’t mean that, what I meant was. And that it can be misinterpreted so that you can get 10 different things out of one simple sentence.

Terri Connellan: So there’s probably a lot of argument for intuitives working with sensing coaches, isn’t there and the opposite way around?

Sue Blair: I think so. Yes. I think often about the sort of coach I would go to. There would be no point in me going to a coach who had my preferences. I’d probably enjoy it, we’d probably have a marvelous time. Why go to another ESTJ or ISTJ? I can ESTJ somebody out of the park. I need to have another perspective.

And perhaps that’s why a lot of people who have my opposite preferences, cause I think there’s some statistics around that the people with intuiting and feeling preferences and sensing and feeling preferences are the most likely people to require or to go towards having coaching. Maybe an ESTJ perspective can be really helpful as indeed I find intuiting preference is really helpful in coaching. Let’s go and talk to somebody that had just has a different view. Because I don’t want to hear the same thing again. I want to see what I’m missing. And though I can do it by myself, under stress, we do tend to exaggerate our natural preference and so we can kind of block out and have blind spots to some of those areas that aren’t as easily available to us. So yes, I would agree with you on that.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. Interesting point. You mentioned creativity. And one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of creatives and writers that I work with, they’re often intuitive in preference, and when I talk about sensing and intuiting, they often find it hard to understand that they’re not sensing in preference because I guess perhaps as writers, they see themselves working with the five senses and noticing what’s around them. What would you say to that? It was just an interesting conundrum.

Sue Blair: Yes, I think it is. And I think when you’re looking at type, you have to really differentiate between what is being human and what is type? Where is the line there? And there are a lot of people who I speak to say, well, I, you know, I use sensing and I love going for walks in nature. And I love enjoying all of the beauty of the things around me. I say, yeah, but that’s being human. That’s not type. You know, when you have some information that you need, when you have got a problem to solve, where do you go to? And that’s where your type difference comes in. So I think there’s definitely that distinction to draw. What is human and what is psychological.

And I think if those with an intuiting preference didn’t use sensing, well they’d be bumping into things all the time? You’ve got all of your senses and you’re going to use them. Those with an intuiting preference absolutely do that. Those with a sensing preference still do have an imagination. We are very skilled with our imagination. We just use it at different times and in different ways.

Terri Connellan: So yeah, it’s about what your preference is, what you go to perhaps first or naturally.

Sue Blair: Yes, absolutely. Although, I was talking to a friend of mine who has INTP preferences and she says, I am so in my head that I do bump into things from time to time. She was just saying, I don’t just bump into something that is a surprisingly, there. She said I bump into my kitchen table, which hasn’t moved for years. I’ve just got myself inside my head thinking something through. And I literally don’t notice. I’m not aware of what’s going on, that does happen also.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And I often say that to clients who are similar types to me, like that introverted, intuitive, dominant, I have to actually make myself leave this room because you know, I’ve got to have all my resources, my imagination, my whole world’s in this room and I actually have to lever myself to go out and go for a walk on the beach. And when I do, it’s the best thing in the world because I get that balance that I need.

Sue Blair: Absolutely. And I really think that knowing type, you can be intentional about using these other preferences. And I think that’s really important because you do need to recognize your blind spots and just go, what am I missing here? That’s an important conversation to have for everybody to know what your strengths are.

And sometimes your superpower is to understand your flaws and not be frightened of them. I can’t do that. Yeah. But that doesn’t worry me. I’m okay. I will either get some support in this area or I would kind of intentionally force my brain to just ask a few questions that I wouldn’t normally ask. Think outside the box. What am I missing here? Is there an elephant in the room? Is there something I haven’t noticed? And sort of direct your attention in a different way, which is a lot easier to do when you’re not stressed.

Terri Connellan: That’s for sure. Yeah. And I’d love your writing and insights on the inferior function, which is in part what we’re talking about here, that real opposite of our dominant preference. So can you explain a little bit about the inferior function and why people might choose to work with it as a form of self-awareness and growth?

Sue Blair: Yeah, actually it’s a good segue having had that conversation just now, really, because I think in my view, the inferior function would be better if we reframed it and retitled it. I think it isn’t actually inferior. I call it the balancing function. We all need to have a balance. Some of the images that I put across when I’m doing workshops is that I have the image of a horse that’s got out of control. You know, when your dominant function runs away with you, you literally can’t put brakes on it.

But neither are we going to trot perfectly round a dressage arena and get out sort of extended trots working smoothly. Life isn’t like that, you know, we’re not going to do things perfectly. So we are going to have to rumble with things and we will just maintain as much control as we possibly can. So I think that’s what the inferior function allows us to do. It just reigns us in from making some stupid mistakes from just letting the whole thing, get out of control. And try and engage with it rather than ignore it completely, which is going to send us off in the wrong direction.

So the presentation that I’ll be doing for BAPT is called Type in Tandem. And that’s really thinking about what is it like to ride a tandem bicycle? You know, you’ve got somebody on the front and you’ve got somebody at the back. If you think about that as your dominant/ inferior function. If the only person that’s working is the person who’s at the front, who’s got the steering wheel and is driving everything, but is not getting any power from the back, then it’s just hard work.

You need to have that person on the back. You need to have like this psychotherapist, that’s tapping you on the shoulder. That’s going, excuse me. Have you thought about this? Let me help you with. And that combination of types can be really great. So with my preferences, for example, and as ESTJ, my dominant function, extroverted thinking, it needs introverted feeling to say, is this important? Does this really matter? Is the energy that you’re putting into this activity worthy? Is it something that is going to produce good results? Not as it necessarily going to give you happiness? But it’s what you are doing going to make you happier than you were? Are you working towards something that’s meaningful and important to you.

And I do really find that in certainly in my later years, I’ve been able to tap into that. Similarly, as I’ve mentioned, my lovely sister has INFP preferences. She works the other way around. She actually is an artist, she does beautiful work. She does work that is meaningful to her and her values are strong. But if you just sit with strong values and do nothing with them, then that’s not a life well led either. So she needs to take those inner values and those inner core resources that she absolutely has in spades and just say, okay, so now what am I going to do with this? What am I going to put out to the world?

Because that doesn’t need to stay within me. I need to put something out into the world so that I have this legacy that I believe in and is strong within me. And you can use extraverted thinking to do that. You know, how am I going to organize my life so that the introverted feeling that is key for me has an external expression that is helpful to others

So the inferior function can just be incredible. It can be incredibly powerful and it can also be very, very difficult if you have no access to it whatsoever. We need to have those functions, whatever is your dominant and inferior function, they do need to be working in cahoots. They need to understand each other and tap in and say, hello? What advice can you give me on this one?

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I love that article that you wrote for BAPT (Invoking the Inferior Function) a little while ago, and again, I’ll link to it in the show notes, on the inferior function. And for each function, you’ve got a lovely question just as you’ve shown us in those examples of, if you’re really strong on this function, how to bring in the opposites through just asking a question. Certainly for my type, that question was like, oh, you know, just takes you back, because it’s completely where you need to be focusing, but it’s not in your consciousness.

Sue Blair: Absolutely. And I think we can all, have even a list of questions available to us before we’re decision-making certainly. I mean, your dominant function is the one that I really fail to get. You know, that future thinking. Looking back in my past, I would take my life one term at a time when I had children one year at a time was the maximum I’d look out. To actually go to the top of the mountain and look any further was, is really difficult for me. And for anybody who’s saying, well, what’s your five or 10 year plan. It’s like, I have absolutely no idea, but it’s probably a good idea to look five and 10 years ahead.

What you’re doing now could be really relevant to what you might need to be doing in five or 10 years time, but it just simply doesn’t occur to me to go and do that. So I need to be dragged, kicking and screaming into your head, Terri, tell me a few things.

Terri Connellan: Must be great having a twin who’s your exact opposite in terms the types.

Sue Blair: Yes, it’s got better and better as we’ve got older. As you can imagine through our younger and teenage years, there was some tricky patches, but I think we’ve forgiven each other. I think she had to forgive me for a whole lot more than I had to forgive her to be honest, but we’ve absolutely worked it out. But I would highly recommend anybody who understands type and who knows their type preferences to find somebody who is their complete opposite and just build a connection so that you can just link in with each other and say, I’m thinking like this. Can you help me out with that?

Terri Connellan: That’s a great idea.

Sue Blair: Link up with someone who’s your opposite, so you’ll have to find an ESFP, Terri.

Terri Connellan: So the last couple of questions are questions that I ask each guest on the podcast because it’s the Create Your Story Podcast, interested in how you have created your story over your lifetime. It’s a big question, but interested to see what pops up.

Sue Blair: If I look back over my life, I can really see my type preferences being in action from the early years, as you can imagine. I think what understanding type has really given me as an adult is it has absolutely allowed me to make sure that I’m doing work that uses my strengths. And that there are some things that I can’t do. So if you’re waiting at a bus stop and several buses come along, there’s been several buses in my life that with my type knowledge, I’ve gone, that one’s not for me. I can do this, but this one I can’t. And then my bus comes along and I go now that one I can do. Yeah. That one’s for me. And to not be anxious or worried about it.

So I’ve found that increasingly helpful as I’ve gone through the years, being able to adjust and use the skills that I have in a way that I know is going to enable me to give my best to the world. We were saying earlier about my role in type is to take the complication out of things, make things simple and communicate it as clearly and concisely as I possibly can so that people get it first time. They’re not just struggling and having things ramble around in their minds, giving them something that’s concrete. And so I feel like I’m able to do that. Even with the Personality Puzzles. I had a prototype of the Personality Puzzles, when I first went on my certification program. So before I’d even been certified to use type, I realized that I needed a tool, a resource to help me talk to people about it so that they could understand it clearly. And I could get that, that information back.

So I think it that has definitely assisted me. And I think it will assist me still going forward. So creating my story, I think it also enables you to be happy with the story that you’ve got. I’m happy with the fact that there are some things that I can’t do. I really admire people who have different talents to me. I think it’s allowed me to not be so swift to step back and watch and enjoy people, having other talents, without feeling envious of them or wishing that I had them those sorts of feelings and, and just being a lot more comfortable in myself. It’s just helped enormously.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. What I’m hearing from you with that, that type has been such a huge part of your story as it’s evolved. And it sounds like it’s been a real tool for wisdom.

Sue Blair: I hope so. It definitely has given me other perspectives. One of the things that I really like when I’m writing, I’ve done as, you know, several resources and I write type descriptions, and they’re not easy to write, especially when you’ve only got an A five piece of card in which to put as much information as you possibly can about a particular type.

And my modus operandi for doing that was to literally sink myself into each of the 16 types while I was writing about INTJ or ESFP or whichever one, and it would be quite a task in any given morning that I knew I would be doing some writing, and I just go, which one do I want to be today?

And then just immersing myself in this ENTP brain of like, well, okay, let me be this for a day or two days and just thoroughly enjoying it, being able to glean so much from not only the other types of descriptions that you’re reading, but just to create something that is different and valuable that people are going to get in just by reading those type descriptions. It’s a very therapeutic way of doing it and an interesting dive into being someone else for a while. I guess actors do that a lot with their characters. I can’t claim to have any acting skills whatsoever, I imagine it’s a similar process that you cloak yourself in someone else for awhile, and then you can shed it. It’s fascinating. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it must’ve been amazing working through all 16 types. I’ve had a taste of it with doing workshops, with Dario Nardi with his priming, where you put yourself into exactly what it’s like. I worked particularly on INTP and just putting myself in the shoes and working with an INTP as a a partner in that exercise made me realize how different life is and how running so many processes in your mind as an INTP typically does all the time. It was incredibly cognitively busy.

Sue Blair: One of the sensing activities that I do in workshops is they literally have different colored acetates, blues greens, yellows, and I just get people to hold them up to their eyes and just say okay, looking through the red acetate looks like this. Now change to yellow or change to blue or change to green. And it’s as different as that.

People just see their world with totally different filters and unless you know about it, then you can’t be aware of it. But once you know about it, you will never not know it. And that’s the beauty of understanding type. You will never go through life, not knowing this information. And I think it is, It’s a gift really. It’s gold in people’s lives.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And I think that’s why so many of us who work in type have chosen to do that. Just as you’ve explained, once you learn the value of it for yourself, but also working with others, it is really gold. And as you were talking there, it sounded like type was like a framework for choices, for discernment too, which I think is really powerful.

Sue Blair: Yeah, absolutely.

Terri Connellan: Awesome. So in Wholehearted, my book, I have 15 Wholehearted Self-leadership skills and practices for women. And to add to that body of knowledge, I’m interested in your top wholehearted self-leadership practices, especially for women.

Sue Blair: It’s an interesting one. Isn’t it? And I think one of the things over the years that I have come to really want to reframe in people’s minds is this imposter syndrome. People are talking about imposter syndrome a lot at the moment, and I’m not too sure that it’s helpful. I think that both men and women do get it, but I think women may have it more obviously, or more often. I haven’t got any research for that, but in my knowledge of, in the work that I’ve been doing. And I kind of like to reframe it because I think that it is absolutely necessary to have a reasonable and realistic doubt about some of the challenges that you might take on.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean you have a syndrome, you are not an imposter. You just have some reasonable doubt and it certainly doesn’t mean that you’re not going to take on the challenge. So instead of saying, well, I’ve got imposter syndrome and I’m terribly worried about it and I might not do it. Why am I here? It’s like, okay, I’ve got some reasonable doubt, but I’m going to do it anyway. And I think that’s a far better way to look at it because we all have some doubts along the way.

And I remember going to a conference for careers advisors. And they said that the research there is that before women apply for a promotion or a new job, it is very likely, more likely than with men, for them to think, well, I haven’t got some of the things that this job description is requiring. So I won’t apply until I have consolidated and done an extra course or done another two years or built up my skills so that I can apply for the job. And men tend not to do that. They tend to tick 50% or 60% of the boxes. And say, I’ll just give it a go.

And I think we need to do that as women a bit more often, and to stop consolidating and thinking, yes, I need to do this, this, this, this, this, and this before I can do that, that, that, that, and just, yeah, it could be a challenge. You may have some reasonable and rational doubts, but do it anyway. I know that there is that book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, but it’s experience the doubt that’s reasonable and rational and do it anyway.

Terri Connellan: That’s a great top tip. A coach that I trained with a little while ago, he stressed the importance of not waiting until you’re free of fear or free of doubt, but to move ahead with those, because he said, they’ll always be there with you. And if you wait until you’re free of doubt or fear, you’ll never move.

Sue Blair: And get support. I love the work of Brené Brown and she talks about vulnerability. And it’s okay to have that vulnerability it absolutely is. We need to shift this idea that we may have in our heads about leadership that means that we don’t need to be vulnerable. You know, we’re going to make mistakes and failure we learn from and grow from. We don’t want to make huge mistakes. but we don’t want the fear of it to stop us doing something. And so, saying to yourself, this is a reasonable and realistic doubt. Okay, let me just go ahead and just give it my best shot.

Terri Connellan: Mm. I love that. That’s a great thing to remember. So we’re just about at the end of our time together. So thanks so much for joining me today, Sue. It’s been great to learn more about you and to chat more about type and through all different aspects of how type can be such a powerful framework for us in guiding our lives.

So where can people find out more about you and your work online?

Sue Blair: Oh, thank you. So I’ve got a couple of websites, one of them for my resources, which is PersonalityPuzzles.com. And then for the coaching work and the presentation work that I do. It’s sueblair.co.nz. Or in fact, personalitydynamics.co.nz. Either one will get you there.

Terri Connellan: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. It’s been wonderful.

Sue Blair: You’re very welcome, Terri. Thanks so much for having me.

About Sue Blair

Sue has been working with psychological type for 20 years. She is an international presenter and keynote speaker, as well as a qualified MBTI practitioner and adult educator. She is the author of The Personality Puzzle coaching cards, now used worldwide by coaches and counsellors. She has taught thousands of teachers, parents, students and businesses about the importance of self-awareness and communication. Sue is the recipient of the APTi 2015 Gordon Lawrence Award. This award recognises an outstanding achievement to the field of education

You can connect with Sue:

Website: SueBlair.co.nz or PersonalityPuzzles.co.nz

Personality Puzzles: https://www.personalitypuzzles.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sue-blair/

Terri’s links to explore:

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

Other free resources: https://www.quietwriting.com/free-resources/

My coaching & writing programs:

Work with me

The Writing Road Trip six month membership program – enrolling now for a 2 May start

The Writing Road Trip email list – community writing program with Beth Cregan

Connect on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingquietly/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/writingquietly

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terri-connellan/

Leadership, Self-Awareness & Life Trails with Brian Lawrence

January 28, 2022

Insights, tools and strategies for being a more whole human.

Welcome to Episode 11 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Leadership, Self-Awareness and Life Trails.

I’m joined by Brian Lawrence, Director of Life Trails Consulting and an accomplished global facilitator, Leadership Coach, MBTI Master Practitioner and EQi Master Practitioner.

We chat about Brian’s journey to leadership coaching and facilitating and his love of working with teams and individuals on self-awareness with many tools including personality type and emotional intelligence. And his recently developed program, Dancing with Your Inner Wolves, which inspires personal growth through an innovative approach to the Jungian cognitive functions. It all focuses around how we can be a more whole human.

You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

Self-awareness and personality type
Leadership and self-leadership
Certifications and learning frameworks
Misunderstandings about introverts
Brian’s Dancing with Your Inner Wolves program
Our 8 inner wolves and becoming holistic person
Working with cards and tactile learning
And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 11 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 28^th of January as I record this. Can you believe it’s nearly the end of January? It’s super warm here in Sydney and the water is just perfect for swimming right now. I’m busy behind the scenes preparing for The Writing Road Trip Free Challenge which kicks off next week. More on that in a moment.

I’m excited to have Brian Lawrence join us for the podcast today to chat about Leadership, Self-Awareness and Life Trails, which is the name of Brian’s business and captures the essence of his work.

Brian Lawrence is the Director of Life Trails Consulting and an accomplished global facilitator and coach. He is an MBTI Master Practitioner and EQi Master Trainer and has accredited over a thousand practitioners in 7 countries over 11 years. He has designed and led numerous programmes in team development, emotional intelligence and leadership across the globe. Brian’s clients include The Warehouse Group, The West Auckland trusts, OXFAM, The Well Connected Alliance, Roche, ASB Bank, Shell, Rio Tinto and BP. He has been a leadership coach and facilitator for 18 years.

Brian and I met via our mutual interest in psychological type, particularly through the Australian Association for Psychological Type. We share a passion for wholeness and integrating aspects of personal experience, valuing and truly knowing our strengths and identifying where we can stretch. I’ve had the pleasure of attending workshops with Brian and experiencing his excellent facilitation and experiential learning approaches including recently when I attended his Dancing with Your Inner Wolves program

Today we will be speaking about Brian’s work in leadership, personality type and coaching especially as they relate to self-awareness and becoming a more whole human.

Before we head to the conversation with Brian, I want to let you know that The Writing Road Trip Free Challenge I’m hosting with my friend, writing buddy and brilliant writing teacher, Beth Cregan kicks off on Monday 31 January with 6 free 30-minute workshops over two weeks. So, sign up for our mailing list now to get all the information. The focus of the free challenge is on Writing Identity and we aim to inspire you to start from where you to create what you desire in 2022. Plus it’s all about writing with the support of a community as we know the value of this from our own experiences. Our private Facebook is open and you can download the Challenge Workbook now. We are going to have so much fun, and you’ll be inspired to engage with your writing plans and writing self in new ways and connect with others focused on writing. So, if writing is a priority for you in 2022 – whether it’s writing a book, blog posts, a course, family history, anything at all, join us. Links are in the show notes. An easy way to find them is to head to quietwriting.com/podcast and click on Episode 11.

So now let’s head into the interview with the fascinating, skilled and inspiring Brian Lawrence.

Transcript of interview with Brian Lawrence

Terri Connellan: Hello, Brian, welcome to the Create Your Story podcast.

Brian Lawrence: Thank you, Terri. It’s great to be on.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it’s fantastic to talk with you today. So we’ve connected around personality and psychological type as members of the Australian Association for Psychological Type community. Can you provide an overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work you do?

Brian Lawrence: Sure. So I’ve been working in learning and development. I would say pretty much my entire life. So I started my career as a teacher and a trainee educational psychologist in Singapore. But found that teaching 8 to 11 year olds, wasn’t quite what I wanted to do. It was turning my hair gray very early in life. So I decided to move on and do a Master’s in Organizational Psychology in the UK and found my love of adult learning while I was doing that. It took a while to get around to that.

When I came back, I worked in user interface design within an IT company for a couple of years. And then finished that and went on to lecture at the Open University in cognitive psychology, and then discovered that I really wanted to work for myself. So I started a company doing leadership development for young people.

And initially I was using games like Dungeons and Dragons to spark creativity and leadership in young people. We ran that for a group of student leaders in Singapore. So that went on for about a year. And then I had the opportunity to be a learning development manager for the British Foreign and Commonwealth office. So they were starting up a group of regional training centers all around the world. So I was one of nine L and D managers to be recruited to start this training center up. So I ran learning and development around the Southeast Asian and Australasian region for four and a half years.

And that really cemented my love of adult development and adult learning. Along the way I trained as a coach as well, as an executive coach. So I was doing a lot of internal coaching in the organization. And then I was recruited by what then was sold to the Myers-Briggs company.

So it was a little niche consulting company called Hemisphere Consulting in Singapore. And they then became the Myers-Briggs company in Southeast Asia. So I started running Myers-Briggs certification programs back in 2008. I’d been introduced to the MBTI in 1996 and I fell in love with the concept. I really enjoy ed understanding personality type. I just never had the chance to actually use it as a practitioner until I joined the foreign office and I got certified and we started using it with teams and with employees. So when the opportunity came to actually be a Myers-Briggs practitioner and a certification trainer, I jumped at it. So I was doing that for about 11 years. Trained over a thousand people, I think across Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, right up until, would have been 20 19, 20 18/ 20 19. So yeah.

Terri Connellan: Amazing story. It’s lovely to hear people’s life stories and how something starts as a passion or an interest like teaching and learning, and then moving into adult learning, then moving into personal development. But sounds like development of individuals, particularly to the best of their potential is a key theme in all the work that you do.

Brian Lawrence: Absolutely. I’ve tried to keep developing my interest in both personality type and other aspects of learning and development as well over the years. So I trained as a team coach last year. So my current niche is moving into team coaching and senior leadership teams. But keeping that self-awareness piece with personality type at the center of it as its foundation.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And I can see that leadership and promoting self-awareness and authenticity in leaders is a key focus in your work. So why is that important to you and how does self-leadership relate to leadership?

Brian Lawrence: Well, I believe leadership starts from within, and it really starts with self-awareness and leaders being able to reflect on who they are, what their strengths and blind spots are, the impact that they have on their teams, their people, their organizations, understanding their deeply held values and their principles, what those are and how those impact their teams.

So I work with both individuals and teams to create those deep insights through an understanding of who they are, what their personality is. And I find that that really creates a lot of aha moments.

To give you an example. I had a group of doctors that I worked with a few years ago. And at the end of it, one of the doctors, he was in his mid fifties, I would say. And one of his biggest insights was. Oh, I didn’t realize that other people thought differently from me. I mean, can you imagine that, going through life thinking that your way of thinking is the only way of thinking and just creating those insights is a great start to creating better leaders, I think.

Terri Connellan: And that insight that the doctor had. I think that’s such a nugget for many people, isn’t it? It might not be as clearly articulated as that for some people. But I think it’s that idea that we do tend to think, why can’t you see this? It’s obvious to me that it’s like that. And it’s our own framework of seeing things is so natural for us. We just assume everybody’s the same.

Brian Lawrence: Yeah. And a lot of people, they come out of it, going I just thought everyone was stupid .And then realizing, no, they’re actually not. In fact, there was a video recorded with a mining company in Western Australia and they interviewed the mining supervisor and she actually said that I thought everyone worked for me was actually stupid. And then after doing a personality type workshop with the team realized that they actually thought very differently from her.

Terri Connellan: And that’s that realization too, that having difference can really help you both as a person and as a leader, understanding what you don’t have, understanding what the other has and taking it on. So can you provide some insights into how you work with leaders and teams on self-awareness?

Brian Lawrence: So typically I have been running workshops, so a lot of my work was around doing one day workshop around personality type to create those insights of getting people to understand what the individual types are and how that impacts the people around them, how it impacts the way in which they communicate, the way in which they lead. And I also use it as a foundation piece in my coaching work with individuals.

So I start with the Myers-Briggs or TypeCoach, to create that awareness of who they are, what their blind spots are, what their strengths are, the particular leadership style that they might adopt and how it’s seen by other people, their peers, their direct reports. Their own managers and then start to build on that. So starting with a degree of self-awareness and building on what that self-awareness then impacts for the greater team, the greater organization.

Along with that, I also do some work around emotional intelligence. So, starting with your personality, then emotional intelligence. So then maybe even doing a 360, like The Leadership Circle.

Terri Connellan: And you’ve got an amazing range of tools and frameworks in your toolkit that you can draw on for the work that you do. It’s really impressive to see.

Brian Lawrence: I’ve been collecting certifications, I think over the past 10 years.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, as an individual, everything you do helps yourself as well. It’s a framework of understanding that you have like a toolkit you can dip into whoever you’re working with to be able to apply that knowledge that can help someone shift.

Brian Lawrence: Well, one of my values is curiosity. So I think just being inwardly curious, and then being curious about people as well, I think has helped me work with leaders. So it just putting different pieces of that puzzle together. So every instrument, every tool that you use is a different piece of the puzzle. So the more, the more pieces you can put together, the better.

Terri Connellan: Fantastic. It must be a great experience for the people that you work with and for yourself. I think, everything we do as a person, whether it’s develop skills, gain skills, a body of work we create helps us to create our own story, doesn’t it, as we bring it together?

Brian Lawrence: And I think almost every workshop I’ve done, every certification and program I’ve done, I’ve learned as much from the participants on the program, as I hope they have learned from me as well. So I’ve grown a lot in working with such a diverse group of people over the years.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it’s beautiful work to be in. So you’ve mentioned, Myers-Briggs and personality and psychological type as a key framework that you’ve been involved with both, as a framework you use and also as a trainer in that area. So why did you choose to specialize there and how does type help people to be more whole and self-aware?

Brian Lawrence: Like I said, when I first got introduced to type it, it kind of almost opened the door to a whole new world. And I found that that really resonated with me, understanding how I communicate, how I take in information, how I make decisions and what drives those decisions, where I get my energy from in particular being an introvert and understanding that, that’s okay.

Understanding that, no, I don’t want to go and party on a weekend. I’d rather stay in and watch a video or read a book and getting recharged that way. And realizing that a lot of people who were perceived differently, like me would actually take a lot of comfort from that. So understanding who they were and who they were is actually okay. It’s normal.

I think that’s one of the great strengths of understanding personality type, that who you choose to be or who you are, who you are being in the world is okay. Whoever you are and being different is being different. There’s nothing wrong with it. And conveying that to people on teams, especially where you may have a couple of team members who are always perceived to be a little different, a little quirky, you know, there’s nothing wrong with you.

You’re just living differently in the world. Not only did it open up a doorway for me, but I find that it opens up a doorway for a lot of people who start to understand personality type. And it’s such a non-threatening way of working with the team as well.

I mean, there are some personality instruments, there are some psychometric instruments that can be quite judgmental. I mean, do you really want to work with a team where you’re looking at people and saying, well, your level of neuroticism is fairly high. I mean, that’s going to shut people down immediately. Instead of that, you’re saying, you have a preference for introversion. You work with your inner world world a lot more. You’re quite selective about the energy that you put out. That’s such a nice way of actually getting people to understand their place in world.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s what I’ve found also with my personal experience. Same as you it opened a door for me as an introvert, INTJ preference woman. And I think also, as you said, it helps people realize why they might be a bit different. So for me, for example, as a thinking woman, I’m not the norm, you know, the majority. More women have a feeling orientation. So I think for individuals to realise whether it’s in the context of their personal life or in the context of a team.

For me in the workplace, I couldn’t always come up with ideas immediately in the meeting, or it might take me the whole meeting and I’d summarise everything that was said, because I could sort of think it through, but I wasn’t the person to get up and speak impromptu. That was not my forte. So I guess it’s just understanding why some things are easier and some things are harder.

Brian Lawrence: I think Susan Cain in her book Quiet sums it up perfectly. Isn’t it? I mean, a lot of people, women in particular, where it was women in the legal profession who felt that they were losing out on opportunities because they weren’t speaking up because they did have a preference for introversion and it’s such a cultural impact that being introverted has in a corporate atmosphere.

Terri Connellan: But it certainly seems like there’s a lot more awareness these days. People talk more openly about introversion and extroversion and understanding the different types. But I think it’s certainly a great framework for helping people to be more self-aware and understand others.

Brian Lawrence: I certainly think so.

I think there’s still a lot of misunderstanding around introversion. Just a few years ago I was asked, what’s your personality type? And I said, well, I’m an INTP, I have a preference for introversion. Oh, so you won’t be a very good facilitator then.And I said, well, that’s not necessarily the case. I mean, in my case, I know I’m an introvert. I know I have that preference for introversion, but I’ve always done extroverted things. I’ve been an actor. I’ve been on stage. I’ve been in televised school debates. And I enjoy being on stage and I enjoy facilitating.

So, I think that’s something that people still are yet to understand that being an introvert doesn’t mean that you are going to shy away from the spotlight. It might mean that. But it doesn’t mean you can’t do things that require a sort of an extraverted energy.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I love that example. Very true. I think too, it’s that realization that the skills you have. In fact might make you a very good facilitator. That ability to listen, again, you don’t want to stereotype, but some of the preferences for introverted ways of working do mean that you’re going to be very skilled in that environment to pick up individuals, to listen, to reflect back what people are saying.

Yeah. So your recent work in this area is focused on Dancing with Your Inner Wolves. And I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with you recently on this, which I thoroughly enjoyed and am still thinking about. Can you tell us about the eight inner wolves that make up our personality and how we might use this framework you’ve created for insight and growth.

Brian Lawrence: Okay. The concept of your inner wolves came from my own interest in native American culture and the movie Dances with Wolves back in 1991 really struck me And a lot of what was done in the movie actually influenced the creation of my company Life Trails.

So, the old Cherokee proverb, you have two wolves within you. One is a Wolf of good, and one is a willful evil, and they’re both battling each other. And the one that gets expressed is the one that you feed. So I’ve used that analogy a lot in my work in personality type and talking about type dynamics during my MBTI certification programs, talking about your dominant function, the one that is most prominent within you. And the more you feed it, the more it’s expressed.

So, last year I was thinking about how I could expand that metaphor of the two wolves. And I felt well, it’s not necessarily just two wolves. If you took the idea of the eight cognitive functions that Jung has created and Myers has worked on. So, thinking, feeling, sensing, intuition as the four functions and then the introverted or extroverted energy being applied to each of those giving you eight possible functions or eight possible aspects of your personality. What I call the eight wolves or the eight heroes of your personality. So thinking through that, I thought it’s an interesting metaphor for personality type us having these eight wolves that live within us. But typically we’re only focused on our hero pre-dominant function, which kind of rules the roost, it rules the pack.

But then we don’t usually give ourselves access to the other seven. We typically use the first two, but not the other six. And some people only use the first one. So taking that as a metaphor I thought I’ll develop it into a program around how we could develop each of those eight wolves and get access to each of those eight wolves and become a more holistic human being. So if we could access all seven in a healthy and appropriate way, it would make us a more whole human.

Terri Connellan: I love that. And what I found too, going through the workshop with you is that I love the way you’ve taken the concepts of say, Extraverted Intuition and it’s the Explorer Wolf and how, the Healer is Introverted Feeling. So for people like myself who know the concepts of the cognitive processes and even for people who don’t, I think it makes it a really accessible way of thinking differently about those cognitive functions, maybe fleshes them out in a new way. So I love that.

Brian Lawrence: There’s other researchers who’ve chosen different animals for each of the functions as well. I know a guy in Japan, he’s American and he’s created a whole role-playing game around it. He’s used a rhinoceros and a bear and a Wolf. So there’s different ways of looking at personality and it could be really fun as well. And in just making them more accessible to people.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, exactly. And the great thing we did in that workshop too, was one identify the top, the hero, but also particularly look at one or two that we’re not using some much. So it’s that idea of stretching into our non preferred areas and just practicing. If you’re an introverted person, it tends to be an extroverted type of skill.

So for my two bottom lines, I’m just looking at mine here, were Extraverted Sensing and Extraverted Feeling. And having the opportunity, even in that short time we had in the workshop to practically think about how you might consciously, a lot of it’s about consciousness, isn’t it, being aware of these things. How you might consciously practice these cognitive ways of working in your life was really valuable.

Brian Lawrence: Yeah. So I created a series of cards that initially it was to use in the live workshop. But of course now with COVID, I’ve had to think of different ways in which to present that. So, I’m thinking about virtual cards or virtual focus cards where you can pick a card if you’re doing the workshop off a whiteboard. in a program and look at it and go, okay, this is the activity I need to do.

So, I’ve placed those activities as well on three different levels. So in an easy level one activity could be doing something as simple as observing your chair. What details do you notice about your chair? That’s the Introverted Sensing, or Extraverted Sensing part of you.

There’s also leadership cards where you take a particular Wolf and you look at how that Wolf would respond to a leadership challenge. So, there’s in total about 300 to 400 cards that you could actually access for different activities.

Terri Connellan: Wow. That’s amazing. And you have this passion for developing experiential learning products. Like you’ve just mentioned like a system of cards. So tell us a bit about how this taps into your personal approach to facilitating and learning and how you feel working with tangible things helps to foster insights.

Brian Lawrence: I think that that’s always what I’ve been interested in. As a learning and development manager, I was always looking for new ways to spark learning. I’ve developed lots of different games, activities that people can actually touch, they can use to actually discuss ideas. So one of the earliest games that I had developed was called the Mayan Pyramid. So it’s a series of 40 cards with clues on them. So, you hand those cards out to a team. They each get maybe two or three cards and they put the clues together as a team to solve a problem. In this case to solve how long this pyramid was taken to be built by a group of workers. I’ve always had that interest in tactile learning to.

And, I developed a series of cards called the Pocket Personality Cards back in 2016. And that came from me being overseas. I was in Cambodia doing a workshop for Oxfam around type and change. So we were doing an MBTI workshop. I was sitting in the hotel restaurant and the waitress brought me a menu.

But the menu, wasn’t your traditional menu. It was a series of cards. So you picked out the dish that you want. The dish was on individual cards and you went and gave it to the waitress. And I said, I want the chicken And I thought that was such a simple, elegant way of ordering a meal there. If you didn’t speak English or if you didn’t speak Cambodian, it was fine. All you needed to do is pick out the card and give it to them rather than grabbing them and pointing out that particular dish. And she would take the cards and go and give it to the chef and he would cook up the meal.

And being an Introverted Thinker, Extraverted Intuitive, that got me thinking over the next few weeks and months. And I thought well, no one’s actually developed a series of cards for personality type. Okay. That would be interesting. So I started developing the Pocket Personality Cards with little tips on how to communicate or little tips on leadership or on working with teams. So I came up with three sets of cards. So one for communication, one for teams, one for leadership.

Terri Connellan: That’s fabulous. And I love too in the workshop with the Eight Inner Wolves how even though we’re online, we were able to see the cards and use them. As you said , that makes it simple, makes it accessible. And when we think of the whole body of work around cognitive functions and even each cognitive function, there’s a huge body of work out there. Lots of information. And it’s quite technical some of it, the language is quite hard, but if you can distill it. And I’m sure for you, there’s a lot of work in distilling things down to the actual cards.That’s where your introverted thinking and extroverted intuition would come in as great skills. So in a way you’ve done the thinking for us and said well, here’s a few prompts to explore. And I think that’s what makes that work so accessible.

Brian Lawrence: And actually working with an Extraverted Thinker really helped as well. So I was working with Sue Blair and looking at all of the different activities that that I created. And she said, well, that doesn’t quite fit with Extraverted Thinking, this does. So we refined those. So having a different personality type work with you really helped as well.

Terri Connellan: I love that. Do you use other cards in your work?

Brian Lawrence: I do. I use values cards as well. I think developed by Sue Langley. So I use a lot of that in the workshops that I do. So running a leadership program, for example, I might use the personality cards in the self-awareness piece and then use a value card sort.

There’s another set of cards called Points of View which was developed by a couple of Israeli psychologists and that is just a series of pictures on different cards and use that to spark awareness and insight. I find it useful to use those cards at the end of a workshop as a sort of a visual explorer to get people to articulate what leadership now means for them at the end of all this learning.

Terri Connellan: We were just talking before we came on about Roger Pearman’s recent presentation at the AusAPT Conference earlier in November. It’s November as we speak. And he had a top list of top 10 tips if you’re working with personality type, here’s what you should do if you’re serious. And one of those was about playing with cards and playing with that idea of symbols. Wasn’t it? Yeah, it was a top wisdom tip. So it’s great to see that you’ve been doing that for a long time.

Brian Lawrence: Absolutely delighted to hear Roger say that. I say you finally validated it.

Terri Connellan: That’s what I felt too. As someone who’s written about tarot, cause I use tarot a lot and talk about it in my book. It was my absolute favorite moment of the conference. And he talked about how he used cards with executives too. Not necessarily tarot cards in that case, but similar to what you do. And, that’s what I felt that sense of validation too.

Brian Lawrence: I used to use tarot cards when I was at uni actually. So moving from tarot cards and you’ve got Carol Pearson’s Archetype cards as well. And I’ve recently signed a contract with an organization who uses Jungian Archetype cards as well. Just feed that, continue to feed that. And people like playing with things. They like the tactile nature of learning as well, rather than just sitting there and listening to someone drone on. They like getting involved.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s really exciting. And it’s great to hear about how your work’s evolved too over time. It’s been fascinating to connect with you around that. Absolutely. So, can you tell us about your personality type and the psychological insights you’ve gained over time that have helped you with self-leadership and personal growth?

Brian Lawrence: So my type preference is INTP. And so I’m an Introverted Thinker, I’m an analyst and I think that’s something that I’ve always…. I haven’t struggled with it. I think I was lucky enough to have parents who encourage me to just be who I was and so I really thrived in my own skin too. I did what I wanted to do. I’ve followed my career, making sure the jobs that I sought out, the jobs that I applied to, really suited my particular personality type. It didn’t mean however that I didn’t stretch outside of that.

So running my own business, for example, when I started my company in 2015, I found that I really needed to get stronger in my introverted sensing and my extroverted sensing. So, going through accounts on a weekly basis, looking at budgets, looking at scheduling. I now use a bullet journal. So I make lists of things that I need to do. That’s very introverted sensing, that’s very traditionalist.

So learning about how I can flex into those other aspects or those other wolves has really helped me grow into myself. I think my greatest challenges are Extraverted Feeling and Introverted Feeling. So Extroverted Feeling’s my fourth function and Introverted Feeling’s my eighth function. So getting to understand the opposite side of me, to get to understand my shadow has really been quite challenging and quite eyeopening.

Terri Connellan: And did you find, as I did that stretching into that opposite is a real source of growth as you get older, particularly in midlife?

Brian Lawrence: Absolutely. And being married to an introverted feeler helps as well because you really then understand the opposite in a safe environment. And I think I bring out my extraverted feeling quite a bit in my workshops as well. I’ve been told by some of my participants, that they think I might be an extroverted feeler and definitely not. I’m glad that I’m showing some of that.

Terri Connellan: I found it very warm being in your workshop, even online with all of us all around the world. So, yeah it’s great for us to stretch into and take our strengths forward in new ways. Because when we blend that strength with what’s not so natural for us, often we can really weave some magic, can’t we?

Brian Lawrence: Absolutely.

Terri Connellan: So a question I ask all guests on the Create Your Story podcast is how have you created your story over your life time?

Brian Lawrence: That’s a good question. I think I’ve let it unfold naturally. And I’ll have to say, trust in the universe to give you what you need rather than what you want. And my wife believes very strongly in the law of attraction. I’m coming around to it, but I found that it actually has worked quite well.

For example, back when I was in the army for two and a half years and I just finished. It was my last day in the army. I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Hadn’t had an offer to a university yet. And the day I left, I sort of, well, okay. I’ll see what happens. And a friend of mine calls me out of the blue and says, there’s this university that’s doing interviews. Do you want to come down? I said, okay. And I went and I got offered a place at university and then that chapter, that trail of my life kind of unfolded.

So your life is a series of decisions that you make. And each decision you make gives rise to another part of your trail. So your trail kind of unfolds as you go along.

And that’s what’s happened to me as well. Moving to New Zealand was almost on the spur moment. We were on holiday in Ireland, in Spain, and we came back and my wife said, you know, I think we’ve got to move. And I said, yeah, where do you want to go? And she said, well, how about New Zealand? Oh, okay. The following year we were in New Zealand and I was wanting to start a company. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to do, should I apply for another job? And she said, well, why don’t you write it down, write down what you want, put it away and see what happens.

So I wrote down, I want to start a company by the middle of the year 2015. I put it in an envelope, put it away. By the middle of the year, I’d started my company. So I think letting your life unfold, but also stating what you want, is really important.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I love that. And I think that idea of being intentional and I found a similar thing. I write my goals down for a quarter and be conscious of them, but sometimes forget exactly what I thought I would do. And then I went back and the podcast was one, and I think I had create the podcast kickoff in November. And I’d forgotten and that’s exactly what happened. Yeah. So I think it’s that combination, as you said, that unfolding and I love that your company is called Life Trails Consulting

Brian Lawrence: And it’s similar to your book as well with the spiral. And, I use the spiral in my company logo as well, and that came to me, on my trip to Ireland. I actually had this, you know, in the hour before you wake up and you’re sort of half awake and half asleep, I had this vision of a spiral and I didn’t know why. And I came downstairs to the breakfast table and I started drawing out all these spirals and thinking, okay, we’re talking about trails, we’re talking about life unfolding. And that particular day our friends were taking us to these burial mounds just outside of Dublin and on every burial mound, guess what was inscribed? The spiral.

So it was, it’s kind of mystical and the whole idea of spiral is a trail, but spiraling back to where you were and looking at the patterns that have got you there and whether or not you break out of that spiral sometimes and find a different path.

Terri Connellan: For me the spiral’s about those things, but also about revisiting, like relearning, learning more and to relate it to psychological type too is that we’re often repeating similar patterns. We’re working on our strengths. We’re still having trouble with those things that are a bit pesky for us that we can’t sort out. And we will often find ourselves having the same arguments, butting up against the same situation.

Brian Lawrence: And looking at your limiting beliefs as well.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, exactly. So all those things that come together to make that journey, which obviously we both see in a spiraling evolving, unfolding way.

Brian Lawrence: I’d love to get a hold of your book as well as a gift, actually.

Terri Connellan: Okay. Yeah. We can send you the links cause yeah, it’s available.

Brian Lawrence: Because I know someone I’d like to get it as a gift.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. Quite a few people have bought it as a gift for people. And I really love that. I think it’s that idea that people can see that there’s somebody, you know, either in a time of transition, or someone who needs to reflect deeply on that time. So I look forward to sharing it with you. The book has 15 wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, so that’s a toolkit that I’ve developed based on my experiences. But I love to ask others to add to this toolkit we can all access what your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices would be.

Brian Lawrence: Be comfortable with your own skin. Be grateful every day. Understand that you can be more powerful than you think you are. And there’s this resonant power within you that if you just unlock it, you could do anything. I think those are things that I’ve learned over time. Don’t hold yourself back, speak your truth into the world.

Terri Connellan: I love that. And I think that taps into sometimes what we see on social media where we tend to see other people as experts and, you know, there’s a time for learning. But I’ve heard of procrasti-learning to where people can just keep learning but don’t own their own learning. And writing my book for me was the time of owning my learning. Is that how you, you see it too?

Brian Lawrence: That must’ve been such a growth experience though. I mean, I’ve been listening to your podcast and waking up at five in the morning and writing for 20 minutes and then having a chat and writing again, that takes a lot of discipline.

Terri Connellan: Oh, it does. Yeah. It takes a huge amount of discipline. It’s a long haul creative journey too that whole idea of writing a book. But just as you said with your being comfortable in your own skin, Owning your own stories, that unfolding you talked about, you know, it’s very much a book about unfolding through a time of major change. So, yeah, it’s certainly a big growth journey, but something that’s been really powerful for me to do exactly what you just said, which is own my own knowledge and my own learning and step into my own space as someone who can speak about transition in a meaningful way for others to help them.

Brian Lawrence: Are there more books on the way?

Terri Connellan: There’s one in draft at the moment. So, as part of the work that I did, I asked other women to tell their stories. So there’s about 24 stories that I’ve gathered over time. Partly because I was a bit tired of hearing my own voice. I wanted to hear other people’s voices. So I’ve gathered those voices together and I’m looking to publish that as another book. I went back to those stories when I was writing the book to hear how other people were negotiating similar things. And things like intuition came up time and time again, particularly when people were at a crossroads. It’s particularly then, and when challenging things happen that people start to really listen within or they actually hear voices.

Brian Lawrence: It’s a crucible moment.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. So that piece of work is something I’d like to bring into the world because I think those stories really amplify what it means to be wholehearted in different ways and they’re all different personalities of course so you get to see different aspects.

Brian Lawrence: I’ll look forward to that.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. So thanks so much for being part of the podcast Brian sharing about your story. It’s been fascinating to learn more about you and I hope many of those ideas that were shared will inspire others in different ways or spark some thoughts and some trails to go down for themselves.

So where can people find out more about you and your work on this?

Brian Lawrence: Well, first of all, thank you Terri for having me on your podcast, it’s been really exciting. It’s been really fun talking to you and learning about your own journey as well through the book. So if people want to find out more about me or the inner wolves, my email is brian@lifetrails.co.nz or you can go to my website, www.lifetrails.co.nz. I have a Facebook page as well, Life Trails Consulting. And I think I’ll be starting off a separate Facebook page for the Inner Wolves soon.

Terri Connellan: Fantastic. Yeah, we can pop those links in the show notes so people can head off and explore a bit about the inner wolves cause I’ve found it really fascinating and personally inspiring. So thanks again. Great to chat.

About Brian Lawrence

You can connect with Brian:

Website: Life Trails Consulting

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lifetrailsconsulting

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianlaw/

Email: brian@lifetrails.co.nz

Links to explore:

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

Other free resources: https://www.quietwriting.com/free-resources/

My coaching & programs:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

The Writing Road Trip – a community program with Beth Cregan – kicking off Jan 2022

Connect on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingquietly/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/writingquietly

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terri-connellan/

personality and story podcast work life

Shaping a Multi-Passionate Life with Meredith Fuller

January 6, 2022

Welcome to Episode 8 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Shaping a Multi-Passionate Life.

I’m joined by Meredith Fuller, Psychologist, Author, Media Spokesperson, Career Change Specialist and Theatre Maker.

We chat about shaping a multi-passionate life in practical terms! There are so many tips for living a full, wise and creative life without overwhelm.

You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

Making transitions from work or a life we don’t love
Tools for tapping into what is not conscious
Living a full, multi-passionate life in practical terms.
Meredith’s book Working with Bitches
My book Wholehearted & how Meredith is working with it with clients
Thinking and Feeling preferences in women
Choosing projects wisely
How personality insights can help
How tarot insights can help
Setting boundaries
And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 8 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 6^th of January as I record this and we’re firmly into the new year. It’s warm and humid here in Sydney with lots of rain, so it’s a perfect time for setting intentions and goals for 2022 and also reflecting on my word of the year. I shared about my word of the year for 2021, Author in the past week on my blog. So pop over to see how that shaped up over the year and some tips for applying this learning in your life! More on my 2022 word soon as I ponder on all that it might mean!

I’m thrilled to have my friend Meredith Fuller join us for the podcast today to chat about Shaping a Multi-passionate Life. You might remember Meredith featured in Episode 3 of the podcast as part of the first Wholehearted virtual book launch.

Meredith’s concurrent careers have included author, playwright, columnist & media commentator, talkback radio guest, theatre director & producer, TV co-host, actor, psychological profiler and trainer. As a psychologist in private practice, providing counselling and career development to individuals and groups, she has also consulted to organisations on professional development and interpersonal skills for over 40 years. She ran a university careers counselling service for 12 years and has been a sessional lecturer in postgraduate courses in vocational psychology at several universities.

Meredith and I met via our mutual interest in psychological type as members of the Australian Association for Psychological Type about 4 years ago. From that we have discovered many shared interests and passions. Today we will be chatting about the value of psychological type and personality insights in making change, looking at how tarot can help, my Wholehearted book, Meredith’s book ‘Working with Bitches’ and writing and creative living. One of the things we particularly chat about is being multi-passionate and having a number of projects. There is some fabulous advice about how to make wise choices about where to focus and how to practically structure your life so you don’t get overwhelmed or burn out.

A reminder before we head into the podcast about the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club as a focus for 2022. One of the things Meredith mentions in the podcast is about the value of community and it’s something that’s integral to my life and work. If you’re looking for community, support and accountability for living a more wholehearted life, join me and a wonderful group of women gathering for the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club to read and work through my book Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook together through-out 2022. Part book club, part group coaching, with weekly accountability and prioritising check-ins, it’s a gentle, focused and value-packed way to keep wholehearted living front of mind and make progress to the transitions and transformations you desire in the coming year.

We start on Chapter 1 of Wholehearted in mid-January so it’s not too late to join us now and there is a space for you. People in the group are already commenting on how the accountability is helping them to do things they might otherwise have given up on! So head to the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club.

You’ll also hear more about Wholehearted in this episode and how it can support you. Meredith wrote a fantastic review of the book you can read too.

So now let’s head into the interview with the fabulously multi-skilled and multi-passionate Meredith Fuller!

Transcript of interview with Meredith Fuller

Terri Connellan: Hi Meredith, welcome to the Create Your Story podcast. And thank you so much for your support of me and my book Wholehearted.

Meredith Fuller: I’m delighted with it.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. It’s great to chat with you today. So to kick off, can you tell people a little about you and the roles that you focus on in your work in the world?

Meredith Fuller: So, I’ve been a psychologist for over 40 years. I have a private practice where I’ve seen many thousands of individuals who come for career developmental or personal growth, and I’ve also spent a number of years working in organizations on organizational issues, whether that’s leadership, team communication, mainly it’s interpersonal issues.

And I also write plays that I direct and produce at our venue, and I assist my husband with his short documentaries. So, we’ve got a very psychological focus on that. So essentially what I do is assist people to be the best they can be. And I mainly find that people are often in a position of distress. It could be interpersonal problems with people at work, problems in relationships, a poor fit, and they need some assistance in moving towards whatever their life stage is.

And it’s interesting at the moment, there’s been obviously quite a lot of people who are looking at what next? I’m in my fifties, I’m in my sixties. What now? So there’s a very strong theme there. And the other thing that we’ve been doing for the past two years because of the pandemic issue is working with a lot of people using Zoom to do group sessions or one-on-one sessions.

So, I guess what happens for me is there’s lots of different projects that emerge and if I’m interested, I’ll grab it. So for example, at the moment, I’m making a film with some colleagues about domestic violence. So it’ll just depend on what seems to be the critical issues. And the other part of what I do in writing is I’m an author of books and I do a lot of book reviews and write articles for newspapers, magazines, do some TV work, radio work, just a lot of helping people to understand more about the psychology of people.

Terri Connellan: So many threads, but so many interesting aspects to your life and to your work. And I love that at its core about helping people to be the best people they can be and I think that’s where your work at my work comes together. We’re both interested in that space where people can make choices, make transitions, practice self-leadership, understand themselves to be the best they can be, but I absolutely love all the different strands. And so we’ll explore quite a few of those in our chat today.

So thank you. And thank you for your review of Wholehearted too cause, that was a beautiful first review, which I’ll put in the show notes, but thank you for that. And the work that you do, I’m sure is hugely appreciated because it’s one thing to write and create something, isn’t it? It’s about sharing it with the world too. So thank you for that. So we met through our mutual love of psychological type and it’s valuable insights. So why have psychological type and personality been such powerful frameworks in your life?

Meredith Fuller: I’ve always been psychologically minded. And even as a child, I wanted to be a psychologist and it struck me that I was fascinated all through school about what do I think people will become when they get older so much so that I used to write down all the names of the kids in my class and write down what I thought they’d be when they grew up.

So obviously, the issue of vocation spoke to me very early on, and it was clear to me that people were different and that you could cluster them in some way. And I used to wonder why doesn’t anyone else seem to see what I’m seeing? So I felt quite different and alone with that and I guess for me, what I love about AusAPT and working with psychological type is we have a group of disparate people who are all keen to understand what our differences and similarities are.

And we like looking underneath and we like reflecting back on what we’re observing and to my mind, there’s a great depth of thinking that is so helpful for people. And I certainly find that psychological type has informed most of the work I’ve done since about 1998.

Terri Connellan: Wow. It’s been a really long-term influence then. Yeah. So just to explain to people listening Meredith and I are part of the Australian Association for Psychological Type, which is a connection of people in Australia, but globally who have a passion for personality and psychological type and it’s great community for people who as you’ve said think really deeply about the way we’re made up, the way we’re wired and the influence of that with nurture too. It’s not all about how we’re wired is it? But it’s obviously a big player in how things play out. So how do you work with these insights with clients?

Meredith Fuller: Individuals will come for counseling or careers counseling, and they’ll normally present with distress about their relationships at work or their relationships in the family, or with significant others or their difficulty in forming relationships, their concern about their careers and we’ll explore their lives. And I like to look at childhood through to the present and I like to understand their narrative. But I also like to look at what are their ability, skills, interests, values to get that full picture and what their hopes and dreams are in terms of who was this child? What did that child want in the future? And who is this adult now? What does this adult want?

And increasingly, I’m noticing that there’s so many problems with people who are not being valued and validated in their relationships and at work. And so, the thing that struck me about your titles about, this wholehearted and the shadow coming to work and the half-hearted working. The turns of phrase you used were just beautiful because they just encapsulated for me how people talk about work versus self.

And, I loved the way you gave a number of activities and exercises that they could reflect on, that helped them to see what the misalignment is and what’s changed. And that just sits so nicely with the sort of work that I do with people where something shifted. And if they don’t address what’s going on for them, invariably, they get sick or they have to sever relationships or rethink a lot of things.

So definitely there’s a sense that people are coming because they’re not happy. They’re in distress. They know something’s wrong. And they know that it’s very toxic for them, but they feel so stuck and they often feel very trapped and they seek some support from elsewhere because there’s something intolerable that’s going on.

Terri Connellan: That makes perfect sense with me cause certainly when I went through my journey, in my case, I reached out to a coach. There’s lots of different people or actions we can take when we feel that. But it’s that, as you say, that real sense of misalignment between who we are, what we want to do, what we want to be, and then what’s actually happening. And there’s lots of reasons for feeling stuck isn’t there.

Meredith Fuller: Oh, absolutely. And also the issue of age, life-stage. The sorts of issues people might present with when they’re 27 are going to be very different to what they’re presenting with at 57. So, that’s of concern to me that there’s quite a number of women I find who haven’t got the financial security that perhaps men might have. Historically, we know why that is. And they find themselves in this position where they’re being edged out of their organization, or they’re not ready to leave, but there’s nothing for them anymore. And they’re really at their prime and they might be in their forties, fifties, and sixties, and they’ve got so much to offer, but they just can’t get a gig anywhere so that’s a real concern. And the other one is that similarly with a lot of men who are really stuck, lamenting that nobody wants them and what are they going to do with the rest of their lives? People that have been chewed up and spat out. So that’s very common.

Terri Connellan: And it’s ironic as we get through life, we get more wisdom, more skills and, then we get in a situation where we feel of less value. So it’s a huge issue and it’s obviously something we’ve both really noticed in the work and, and I’ve experienced it myself. So it’s something obviously you’re seeing in your clients.

So in Wholehearted, in your work with clients, we both use psychological type and personality as like a compass or a framework or a way of seeing personal development. I’ve spoken about that in my book, and obviously your story is very different. So do you want to tell us more about your psychological type makeup and how your understanding of your personality and how you’re wired has helped you grow and evolve?

Meredith Fuller: And so my preference is for introverted, intuition, feeling, perceiving, [INFP] and I was aware when I was very young, that there were two parts of me, two aspects. There was the very introverted—I loved reading. I loved thinking, daydreaming and performing, and this would be my outgoing situations. So I started working very young. So I was in professional salaried work when I was four and a half. That was because I came from a single parent home and my father had left and there was no supporting parent benefit. My mother was very unwell. We also had in our house, her mother and her mother’s sister who had Down’s syndrome.

So my mother was quite trapped, as a caretaker and not really able to go off to work. So it was quite dire. But from when I was very young, three or four, I just love singing, dancing, chatting to strangers, that sort of thing. And so there was a photographer called Athol Smith who was very famous at the time.

And he and his wife, Bambi, wanted me to do some modelling with them. And so that began a modelling career and that also led into an acting career. So I had a situation where I loved all that. I could go off to work and earn some money to help my family, but I could do things I enjoyed, which was entertaining groups, being in plays, et cetera.

But I knew that was a part of me. And the other part of me needed that balance of time alone. And I always had that fascination by how people were different. Why were they different? What can I understand about that and how to make sense of all of that? I guess I’ve always been interested in these things and another connection we’ve had is with the the tarot.

So I started reading tarot when I was about 15 and that’s always been a lifelong interest in collecting decks and exploring symbolism and the unconscious. And so locating MBTI when I was working at a tertiary institution. It was about 97, 98. It seemed to me that things very much came together with that because here was something cogent.

It made sense in a way that I just felt encapsulated everything I’d been thinking about. So I seized on that and became very involved in doing something to help people train and bringing that to tertiary institutions, bringing that to organizations and then working one-to-one with clients.

And I found it’s been the most useful thing because it isn’t about people running around doing a questionnaire. It’s about understanding yourself through that self-reflection and observation and imbibing the theory yourself. So, it’s got a lot more to offer than say, there’s a lot of tests and little questionnaires and things people do, and they’re quite simplistic.

And of course the fewer categories, the less comprehensive and the less good affinity. So there’s something about having 16 types that’s so robust and it’s something that people can grasp very easily and then it can help inform, well, who am I with? How do I work? What do I need? Where am my gaps in communicating? So it’s something very practical and very common sense.

Terri Connellan: That really aligns with how I feel too. First it’s making sense of your own personality and your own view of the world, I think often is part of the lens through which we see type. And then, in my role as a coach or your role as a psychologist using those skills to help others to see what your strengths are, where you’ve got blind spots, what you might be missing, because we all just naturally have certain ways of seeing the world that’s so natural to us, we think it’s the same for everybody.

Meredith Fuller: That’s a really good point you’re raising because obviously one of the issues about working in my field is that we see the people who don’t fit, who have got distress, who have got concerns, who do feel different. So , I do have a skewed sample in that sense.

So invariably, what I find is there are certain types who come for counselling and careers counselling and my husband, who’s a psychotherapist psychologist, he finds the same thing. So, we tend to work more with the introverted, intuitive, thinking or feeling perceiving or judging types than perhaps the more mainstream types.

And that interests me as well, that I can actually reframe a pretty horrible life experience for someone, and they can actually celebrate what is unique about them and then work to their strengths rather than feeling unwanted in our society.

Terri Connellan: That’s really powerful work. I think type’s such a valuable tool for reframing, for understanding. I like the idea of it as a compass, as Jung used that idea of the compass and the framework for taking us forward. So, thanks for those insights. You mentioned tarot, which is another love we share. I write about tarot as a tool and a support for wayfinding and personal insight in my book. And I know you have been collecting decks and have lots of insights. What are your thoughts about tarot as a personal development practice?

Meredith Fuller: I love the visual aspect for people. It’s very clear that some people are very auditory and they need to have deep conversation and, and music might be really significant in how I might work with them. For some people it’s visual. So films, things like tarot, help them get the awareness, get the insight, help them to name what’s going on for themselves, and also really help them connect with their unconscious.

And the thing that I particularly like about tarot is that it sits so beautifully with doing dreamwork and how in our dreams, we understand that present, past and future are interconnected. We don’t have linear time, that images can be constructed or archetypal. There are messages in our dreams.

And similarly with working with your tarot and working with your unconscious, you’re actually helping yourself to appreciate what’s going on for you in a way that enables you to perhaps have a few more resources in the moment when you’re feeling lost, uncertain, confused. So it’s something very tangible. And it’s also something that I really appreciate because I love ancient cultures, ancient religions, ancient symbolism, and also futuristic work. So I love how it just seems to combine all of those.

And it’s a great tool for quickly communicating with someone else. It’s a little bit like the way we use type that, you know, we can say, oh, you know, my preference is X. So suddenly we understand a lot very quickly. And similarly with cards, oh look, I keep getting certain cards, what’s going on with me. It’s a good way of quickly absorbing and integrating information that helps us.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So I love two things you said there, firstly, about both tools,type and tarot, or both frameworks are ways of tapping into that unconscious, like what’s beneath the surface or what’s less conscious for us.

And then secondly, how they both like languages or symbolic systems or languages, we can become more fluent in. I love that idea because they do. At a type conference, for example, when we’re together, I just love it. We all understand, at different levels, but it’s sort of a language we can speak.

And as you say, it’s the same with tarot. When I talk about the Six of Swords and the Eight of Cups in the book, I hope people who don’t know that can also get a way in. But for those who understand that, they will bring that understanding to that book. So it just means we’ve got a language for communicating.

Meredith Fuller: It’s interesting. There was a line in the book that was really interesting for me, that you made that I hadn’t seen anywhere else before. And it was very significant. I think, as a teaching tool for a lot of people who are looking at this business of career change. You’re talking about, you’re leaving success. So you’re leaving things that are working, you’re leaving things and you’re going off and you made the comment, you’re actually choosing to leave the successful things.

And that was a very significant statement because for a lot of people where I find they’re stuck is: I earn X amount of dollars and I don’t want to learn less. I’ve been doing this for so long and I’m a partner or a senior administrator or an executive, or I’m a X, Y, Z ed. I can’t leave all this, all this work. I can’t stop and start something where I might earn less or not have my status or not have the recognition. And that can actually paralyze people.

And so we’re looking at the duality of, well, on the one hand, you’re saying you feel dead inside, you hate going to work. You feel there’s so much inside you that’s not being expressed. You’re bored with what you do, even though you’re busy, you feel trapped. And yet you’re saying I can’t let go, you know, do I stay, do I let go?

And there’s something about the way you’ve talked about this card and saying, you’re actually choosing to leave your success. It was just a beautiful way of describing an active decision. And I think that’s very empowering for people who are frightened about letting go of material things, or letting go of how much work they’ve put into something to begin something different.

And with that thread, you also talk about we bring ourselves to every new thing we do. So it’s just a different iteration of what we’ve done before, but some of those phrases will resonate with a lot of people. And it will help give them a boost to say, I can do this. I’m choosing to do this.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that idea of abandoned success, and the image of the Eight of Cups. If you have a look at a fairly traditional pack the cups stacked up, and then a person’s choosing to walk away from the full cups. Yeah. And to me, it’s about identity. It’s about how much of our identity we’ve invested in that role, that position, the money that we earn, whatever it might be. And then that choosing to find a new path is incredibly difficult.

Meredith Fuller: I guess what makes it hard is our society doesn’t understand. So when people say I’m having a change, I’m leaving X or, I was doing a more senior role, but I’m going back to do a more specialist role in the same organization, or I’ve worked long and hard for this and I’ve got all these qualifications and so forth, but I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m doing something else. And how other people really try to interfere and say, you’ll regret it. You shouldn’t do it. What if you can’t get another job and everyone will laugh at you and what a stupid thing to do. And they’re actually, I think often frightened because they don’t want that other person to go off and be happy because they’re not happy either.

So a lot of investment in keeping the status quo. So I think the way you’ve talked about the Eight of Cups in that sense, that it’s a really sound decision to choose to walk away from amazing success, because you know you will have different success and the success you will have is more congruent with who you truly are. There’s something in a lot of those comments that you’ve made that I just think for people reading the book will strike such a chord.

Terri Connellan: Thank you for those comments. I really appreciate it because it’s something I really felt personally. And my aim in writing the book was to help cause when I went through it, I also felt a bit lost. And there weren’t a lot of frameworks in writing the book. It was working through what I experienced, but then trying to provide some anchors for others.

Meredith Fuller: That was another thing. I did want to mention this because I was very struck by how you wrote the book. What’s unique about your book is that you talk about your own process, including everything you did, every book you read, every person you saw and you very generously talk about what you took from each experience. And it’s almost like a little road map of, here’s a whole lot of books you can buy or types of people you can go and see, and how a coach might be different to a therapist.

And there’s so much that you give in that that is so helpful because traditionally when people write self-help books or here’s your way of looking at your career or change or whatever. They’re very much about, well, this is the system and this is what you follow. And, they don’t compare and contrast other techniques or things that they’ve struck. They don’t suggest that very wide exploration and they don’t talk so much about the internal distress.

They’re much more about, okay, so here’s your problem. So here’s step one and that’ll go to step three and then you’ll be at five and then you’ll be done. And so there’s something quite desiccated about reading those books. Whereas with yours, a) because you’re so honest and open about everything that happened to you, people can feel that you understand them. But the way you talk about how you made decisions about, will I go here? Will I read that? What did that trigger? What did that mean? Why is this person good at this? It’s so much more comprehensive for people to say, okay, well, I didn’t like that book and I didn’t like that person. But you know, it’s like a hairdresser. I’ll go and find one that cuts the hair how I want. Thanks very much.

You’ve really given people permission to play with the way through. And I can certainly see how this kind of approach has been missing in the past because there are a lot of books came out in the eighties and the nineties. It’s almost like we get waves of things happening, but they never really hit the spot about people who had this profound sense of emptiness and loss and confusion and concern.

And they didn’t help people who couldn’t just snappily work through each exercise and tick off all the goals and have it neat and tidy. And, I like it cause it’s messy and our lives are messy. And you’ve really captured that for people, which is nice. And that sense that you have with your work is, well, it is going to be unexpected. We don’t know how this is all going away, but it could be this. It could be that. It could be something else, but there’s growth in it and there’s excitement. And there’s learning in this curiosity, and there’s a sense of mastery rather than having a person feel well look, I’m hopeless, even the help books don’t help me cause I’m so hopeless. So to me, you’ve really picked up on a book for our time.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. I really appreciate that cause often when you’re writing a personal narrative like that, it’s that challenge of sharing your experiences a bit like, show don’t tell. I was just chatting about this in another interview, the difference between telling people to do something versus this is what I went through. And here’s what I suggest, which I thinks a more powerful way to go. And you’re also an author. So tell about your books and the topics you focused on in your writing career.

Meredith Fuller: So I’ve written a number of books that were more academic, but the one I did that was more mainstream was called Working with Bitches and it was identifying the eight types of nasty people that you find, nasty women and how to deal with them. And why I did that was, again, part of the theme of what was happening with my work is women were saying I’m really struggling with a particular woman at work who might be my support person, my boss, my team leader, my colleague, and they were being undermined or they were being distressed and they couldn’t understand what was going on.

They didn’t know how to manage it. And they were being so triggered. It was causing great alarm. So I wanted to identify what was happening with these themes. So I did some research and worked on about 2000 cases and put together types based on all of the materials, the data that I gathered and then worked through, well, how could people deal with that in a way that was safe and in a way that also appreciated their personality structure. Because usually the people who were coming to see me were very much feeling preferred women who avoided conflict, who were frightened by power and control issues and were really getting decimated at work or in relationships. Often it might be something about a mother-in-law or a sister-in-law or somebody’s sister or something.

So it was a way of validating that what they were feeling was true, because there’s been such a theme of, oh, you can never complain about another woman. We women have to stick together because we’re all a homogenous group and men are the enemy. So you can’t say that you’re struggling with a woman. So they’re actually being silenced before they could even articulate what was going on for them. So it was a way of appreciating that all genders walk up and down a continuum of nice to nasty and what you can do to manage that better.

Terri Connellan: Oh, it sounds a really practical book cause that’s something a lot of us experience in different ways, but maybe don’t have any reference points to make sense of all of that. And often when that happens, we tend to think, oh, it’s us. Is that something you’ve come across?

Meredith Fuller: Absolutely, and of course the other thing with that too, is that often it’s about different personality types. And if you’re not as aware of your own style, you certainly not going to be able to identify what someone else’s style is or where there could be a mismatch or a misunderstanding, or how you could broach that to make it a little more palatable at work.

And one of the key findings in my work, and this has also been researched by Ian Ball, who is our colleague at AusAPT. Interestingly enough back in the day, many, eons ago, I used to work at a university with Ian where he was Head of the Psychology department. So I already knew him before we found ourselves back together in our association.

His research found that while there are far more feeling preferred females, for women in the workplace who had a more senior role, they usually had a thinking preference. So if there’s only about 25% of females have a thinking preference, 75% of those females will be in a senior role in the workplace.

And one of the things that was very clear to me was that people were coming to me with this terrible distress about a thinking preferred manager who actually wasn’t being a bitch, wasn’t being horrible, was actually really trying to help them grow and develop, monitor them, train them, work well with them, but there was such a misunderstanding about the way they went about this. They were really at cross purposes.

So it was also part of my book to say, hang on, maybe that person you’re having trouble with, isn’t a bitch. Maybe it’s something about you you have to look at. So let’s have a look at how you can work better with those people. And I certainly used to find that working in organizations. I’ve done a lot of work in banks and legal firms and universities, where there tend to be more thinking preferred females in positions of leadership and authority. And often they would be having difficulties with their feeling preferred females. And it really was, talking two different worlds, two different languages and so much misunderstanding.

And there were some things you could do to make it work and that really excites me. And again, one of the things I loved in your book, as a thinking preferred female, you operate very much using your feeling and your thinking preferences. And you talk about your integration of those things. And this is so important in terms of, I think all of us men and women being able to access all the parts of ourselves. So I thought you handled that very well. And one of the things I’ve noticed as, I guess walking the talk in your role as President of our association, I noticed that you do the very thing we talk about. You identify well, who are the people on the team, or who the members, or who am I working with? What do those people need to do their best? How can I respond to that, so that I honor the difference that I have around me and I see you actively do that. So I see you working very hard to connect with your committees and your staff and your members and your groups and whatever, and doing it well. And so to me again, there’s that sense of, okay, so here’s someone who writes a book and she actually practices what she’s talking about and I see it. So that was another thing that struck me about what you’ve achieved in this work.

So it also sat really nicely with me about knowing that, it’s very good for many women, I believe to understand a little more about what the thinking preferred woman’s doing, because, historically, that’s been really a problem for thinking preferred females. They’ve had a terrible time at school. They’ve often had a dreadful time when they not yet in a position of authority and they’re struggling. It’s one of those things where the more we understand our gender, the better, and you seem to be saying on our journey to become all of these aspects, let’s understand how it might be played out as we sometimes swing from one extreme to the other till we find that fulcrum balance and why it is important for us to take the time to consider that innermost part of our souls and how we are who we bring to work. We can’t divorce ourselves from all of that.

What happened for me with the book [Wholehearted] was thinking, well, I’m not able to see as many people. I can’t see them in person. We’re doing Zoom work. It’s a bit tricky holding people. Here’s a resource that people can work through that I would say is safe, trustworthy. It doesn’t humiliate anyone. It doesn’t cause people to feel stupid if they can’t work through the exercises or there’s no problem about working through the Companion Workbook and the book. And it’s something that gives us some dialogue when we have a couple of weeks gap between sessions. So I thought you’ve really come up with a tool, right when we must need something.

There used to be a number of books. Everyone would get one every year, like What Color is my Parachute? They were very superficial and they really didn’t hit this spot about people are really saying, who am I really and how do I want to live my life? What does my life stand for? And how am I in relation to others? And so those very fundamental questions and the way we’re changing work. We’re changing work to be, as you would appreciate, most small business run by women, most new business women setting up, most people going off becoming specialists or consultants who are collapsing who they work with at different times.

This is the way that we’re working and doing several jobs in a year. And just going with the flow. And historically, a lot of the books about careers and development just didn’t take into account the new way that work is emerging. So, I’ve been really happy to say, well, here’s a tool that I can recommend both to men and women, interestingly enough, and get them to work through. And then when we talk, they’ve had the chance to really work through some thoughts themselves and that really adds to our work together. So I’ve been really struck by how you’ve put, certainly your understanding of type in, but also your understanding about how organizations have been working and where they need to be working in the future. So it’s got a real breath of fresh air to it.

Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you. And I was really appreciative too of your comments that it’s a book you can use with clients, that idea of particularly in times when we’re not having as much, face-to-face, it’s something people can take away. And it was certainly designed to be part of a whole that people can work through the workbook, read the main book, have their own reflections, have space, create their own ways of working through it. But have a mix as we’ve talked about before of meandering, but also structure to work through. And I guess that’s the teacher in me as well as INTJ coming out. So, yeah, it’s designed to be that sort of self coaching, self-leadership guide as well, supported by also having a face to face.

Meredith Fuller: Yes, that was another thing I liked about it. We want people to sit with the uncertainty. We want people to explore symbolism and dreamwork and art and literature and film and tarot and everything possible. But we want them to be able to do it in a way that they can then integrate that into their everyday life and this helps them do that. Whereas some sort of new age materials, there’s no relationship to get up each day and go to work, come home, and you have to earn an income and you have to feed yourself. And, you have to be in relationship with other people who aren’t on the same journey and all of this sort of thing.

So I felt that you provided those safe walls if you like so there was plenty of space to bounce around in this, but you knew that you were being held in a very caretaking way while you went about exploring all of these, for some people, very new ways of looking at their careers, particularly looking at tarot cards, for example.

Terri Connellan: Exactly. And I think from looking at your body of work, which is a concept I talk about in the book, that all the skills, all the work that we do, the volunteer work, all the different work that we do, often that idea of having multiple sources of income, being a multi passionate, multipotentialite, is very much embraced, I think, by how I’ve moved and certainly it’s embraced in your life. So with all that amazing body of work you have over time and what I also hear from clients is sometimes having lots of passions, people can feel overwhelmed, by which way to go, what to do, what advice would you give to others who are also looking to embrace their multi passionate body of work and interests?

Meredith Fuller: So I had an INTP mother, which is a great mother to have, so she was quite unique and unusual, and her attitude was, you find your own way, Meredith. Value education and trust yourself, back yourself and so for me, I’ve always felt a little different from a lot of people because I’ve always known exactly what I wanted to do is from when I was very young.

So I’ve never felt, oh, there’s too many things, or I don’t know which one to do first. What I’ve always done is I’ve said to myself, I have to go with what’s most important to me at the moment. So what’s the most burning, exciting thing for me now. And I know there’ll always be plenty of time to either come back to something or do it, postpone it and do it later, or do a little bit of it, stop, do something else. I’ve never felt, aw gee, you can’t play with it all. I just knew you could never do it all at the same time. So I find that my question always will be when there are so many things I enjoy doing, how do I choose? I’ll go with what sits inside of me being best, right thing that I have the most energy for. So for me, it’s often about energy.

So I do a lot of pro bono work for clients, particularly cause I work in the creative arts a lot. There are a lot of people in the creative arts, who’ve got no money and I often see a number of those people for nothing. And how do I choose? Because so many people, how do you choose? And something will happen in that engagement with that individual that I’ll feel, and I’ll go with that. So for example, at the moment, this is a funny story, but it’s a good example of how do you choose what you do? We mainly do a lot of our house maintenance ourselves, but in a two story house, there was no way my 70 year old husband was getting up a ladder.

So we had a housepainter come to do the top bit. And he brought his son with him to help hold the ladder. And they were talking and his son had wanted to be an artist and he was really lost. And he was very distressed and there was something in this young man that I felt. So I’ve now been working with him for some months. So he comes every week and we’re exploring his move towards becoming an artist, how he will go about choosing a course to do, how we’ll go about earning some money, to be able to be a student, to purchase all his materials, how he works in the field.

And his sense of identity and who he’s becoming and how he deals with issues because we’ve all got issues, obviously. And because he’s such an aware person, he has a lot to work through. So there was something I felt in him where I felt he had something very special and I wanted to nurture that. And he’s a very humble person and he’s a very respectful person. He’s got qualities as well. So I’ve really felt drawn to working with him. So there’ll be something about that. Or if I’m choosing a play, I want to write, it’ll be a burning issue that I’ve got some energy for. Nothing that might be commercially successful.

It’s always about what I’m interested in and that’s what I’ll do. And if friends come to me and say, how about a project? I’m doing this. Are you interested? Again, it’s always going to be because I either love working with those people or I love the issue and I’m happy to just trust my own sense of where my energy is saying to go.

And it’s very much like that Eight of Cups card. Often it means I walk away from successful things because there’s something new I want to do and different I want to do that the energy is there for. And I know I’m not saying goodbye to everything forever because there’s plenty of time. So it’s something about noticing what’s the spark, what’s the energy, what’s the curiosity. And if you follow that, they’ll always be a few things that bubble up to the very top, rather than everything. And I really love this notion of, just because you’re really good at something, you don’t have to keep doing it. Do something else.

Terri Connellan: Hmm. I love that too. I think that’s great advice because just some of the people I’ve worked with, what you’re saying resonates. And some of them are INFPs too, which is interesting, it’s that idea of just so many passions, so many interests and they compete. But I think that idea of being more attuned to what you’re drawn to and prioritizing that. I’m also hearing you say almost taking a bit of a project approach to things, to help compartmentalize, I guess?

Meredith Fuller: Yeah, I think it’s really important to compartmentalize because I notice for me, if I want to fit a lot of things, I couldn’t keep doing too much of one thing because there wouldn’t be the space. It’s almost like asking yourself, how many days a week are you fit for counseling? How many days a week are you fit for writing? How many days a week are you fit to do radio interviews or whatever it is, and work out roughly what those clusters will look like, and then be really strong.

So I’ll be able to say, well, I counsel on these days so if you can’t fit in with me, sorry, I’ll refer you to someone else because I can’t keep stretching across taking the space from other projects that I really believe in. Because if I do that, I’ll end up getting sick. I’ll end up trying to overstretch and I won’t manage, and it won’t work.

Terri Connellan: So there’s a couple of questions I’m going to ask podcast guests as we go through. And, this being the Create Your Story podcast, it’s a big question, but I’m interested to see just what comes up for you when you’re asked the question, how have you created your story over your lifetime?

Meredith Fuller: Okay. I’ve created my story by allowing myself to sit a bit away from the mainstream. And I’ve enabled myself to listen to what my heart wants to do, even when it seems at odds with what the sensible thing to do is, or the smartest thing to do is, and almost like back myself, even when it looked ridiculous, because I told myself when I was very young, there’ll be a pattern, I don’t understand it yet, but there’ll be a pattern that will make sense to me, but it’s something that I’m doing that’s going to be unique to me. So I can’t be impacted by what everyone else thinks I should do or what one should do.

I have to trust that little voice in me that says, I know I’m here to do something unique for me. And I’ve always done that and to my detriment often, but it’s like I’m absolutely convinced for me that what’s helped me is by wanting to go off and do whatever it is I want to explore because I’m curious about it. Even if it’s not fashionable or even if it’s way too early and then once I’ve understood it or mastered it or done enough, I don’t have to keep doing that. I want to do something else. So a little bit like saying, yeah, just because you’re good at something you don’t have to keep doing it, do something else, as long as it’s what you’re interested in and you believe in it and it sits with your values.

And my values very much came from my childhood and my upbringing, which was about, to care for people and to care for relationships and to care for what the purpose is that we’re here for. And in a deeper sense, in a much deeper sense. And I’ve always appreciated self-expression. And so for me, creating my story was about saying, well, okay if I can trust myself to follow what my interests are and use that as my guide and not be swayed by what everybody else says you should do, or how everyone else goes about doing things, that’s going to keep me most aligned with my true self. And that’s what I’ll follow. And it was pretty clear to me very early on that I didn’t have a lot of the values that mainstream society seems to have.

I believe that if you do things that are really important to you and you do them very well, somehow you’ll be rewarded and it may not be quid pro quo or tit for tat or something, but somehow it’ll work out. If you are transparent and if you do believe in what you do, and if you do respect other people in how you go about that. You know, that whole thing, isn’t it about freedom but freedom as long as you don’t impact on other people’s freedom.

So that’s been a bit of a narrative for me. And it’s almost like if I had to say, well, where does all that come from? I’m convinced it came from being a little girl who used to believe in her dreams and sitting around daydreaming and imagining the future and imagining things way ahead of time and backing that instead of what was just literally right in front of me.

And that came from coming from a family where we didn’t have a lot, it was very difficult. So we had a lot of trauma in the family, a lot of poverty in the family. But what I had with my INTP mother was a woman who said, use your brains and you can help other people. Use your brains and you’ll find a way to construct something positive out of whatever happens. And I saw her do that. So I had a very good role model in my mother. And I also had a very good role model in reading because I love to write, I was always reading books.

I just found that I was far more interested in thinking big picture future than I ever was in what was going on in the here and now. So it was some something about a knowing that I had and that I couldn’t not know once you have that feeling. And also what was good for me, if this makes sense, it’s like I lived my life backwards.

So if you start working at four, that’s a long time that you’re in the workplace, and if you’re very famous, when you’re a child, well, you’ve sort of been there, done that. It doesn’t matter. It’s like I didn’t have to build up to anything. It’s like, well, I’ve already ticked off this and I’ve ticked off that and I’ve ticked off something else.

And so there’s so many things that I had done that really didn’t concern me at all that I could just go along my own merry way, do what I liked because I didn’t have to prove anything. If that made sense.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Thank you. It’s just fascinating to hear how, with all those different things in the mix, how you created your story to where you are now. So thank you for that. So in Wholehearted, I share 15 wholehearted self-leadership tips, particularly for women, but for all people. So I’m interested in what your top wholehearted self-leadership tips might be for women.

Meredith Fuller: The first one is I believe that it’s a good idea to have a small group of people with you, like your clan or friends or colleagues who you trust, that you feel safe with and who have similar shared values. I take that very seriously. I won’t work on projects with people that I don’t feel that we’re aligned about our values and honesty, transparency, trust, loyalty, all those things are really important to me.

So, that’s a very important issue about who do you connect with. I believe that it’s important to work on communication. So, if I’m going to do it, I need to know how I feel. So I’ll do a lot of checking. How am I feeling? What’s being triggered in me? What do I need to do about that? Can I talk to someone? How do I do that? So in my life I’ve always been keen to look for wise counsel. When I was a child, I got to figure out what I would look for in a partner, because how would I know I didn’t have a father. We were very isolated in our home. There weren’t very many male role models.

So I read all the classics when I was in primary school and I thought, I don’t want all the exciting men. I want all the nice men that I’m reading about in these classics. So I thought: these are the qualities I want in a man. I want a nice man. And I got it from the books. And then as I got older, I realized that I want to understand myself and that will help me understand others.

So anything that would help me do the best I can for myself, I will do. So I went into therapy. I went into supervision. As a psychologist, I think it’s important that we do our own therapy and we do our own supervision. So, whether you go to coaches or whoever you go to, it’s going to someone where you can actually explore your process. So I think that’s really important.

And of course, reading, I’m always reading millions of books so I think that’s important. The other thing I think is working out very simply, what do you need for wellness? So, I’m a diabetic, I’ve got a lot of health issues. I have to say part of my day is managing my diabetes, is going to appointments and is to understand that as I get older, I have less energy than I did when I was younger because of that.

So therefore I have to really cherry pick my projects. So I think, know what your health is. One of the biggest problems I’ve seen in nearly every woman who’s come to me is they push themselves way too far. They work too long hours. Doing work that’s killing them and they can’t stop. And so I think it’s really important to say in the week, how much space have you got for work? How much do you need for sleep? How much do you need for your internal life? How much do you need for your relationships and make that pie and make it work?

And I’d also do that with being strict about those boundaries. So both Brian and I, because we’re helpers and we’re feelers, we’re busy. So people come to helping, feeling, busy people and you need to learn to say no. And so while it would be nice to do everything everyone wants you to do, I can’t. So, be really clear about how do you cluster it. So it might be for me, I work in clusters of time. So it might be two days for this and all night for that and a weekend for that. And that’s how I like to work. Other people it might be well mornings isfor this and afternoons is for that. So know what your best rhythm is and then be really strict about how you protect that. And don’t keep saying, oh, I’ll just let this one in. I’ll just let that one in because you’ll get overloaded and you get sick and then, you’re no good to anyone.

So I think they’re probably the key things for me, but, really overall, it’s something about, got to know who you are. You got to know what’s important to you. You got to know what you’re here for. What’s your purpose. And the threads will probably stay the same, although the execution of that will shift over time.

And so you have to keep saying, does this matter to me? Is this engaging me? Am I growing in this? Am I learning in this? Am I sharing with others with this? What’s the point of me doing this and doing it because you want to do it, you believe in it and you love it. So they’re probably the most important things, but you know, it be sensible. Like you might have to say to yourself, well, how much money do I need to earn to live for the week? Okay. I need to earn x dollars. How many hours a week can I possibly work x hours? Well, what do I need to earn per hour to do that? And what will I do to get that? And then if I’m prepared to say, I’ll do a day for that, then that gives me three days for something else. Okay. That’s fine. So it’s not like a childish, I’ll just do what I like, blow everyone else. It’s about making choices and decisions that give the bulk of your time to what you love and you think is very important, but also that you’re mindful that you do live in a society and you do have to buy food and pay rent and, you know, whatever. So something about, honouring, not only yourself, but the other in relationships.

Terri Connellan: It’s a rich body of knowledge, honed from all your experiences and all your client work too. So thank so much for sharing that. And thanks so much for your time today. It’s been a fantastic conversation and I’m sure the listeners will get so many gems of wisdom and prompts to think about themselves. And thank you also for your comments and kind insights about Wholehearted, my book as well, really appreciate that and your support. So, Meredith, where can people find more about you and your body of work online?

Meredith Fuller: My website’s MeredithFuller.com.au. That’s probably a good place to start.

Terri Connellan: That’s great. And you’ve got so much on there about all the things you’re up to your books, your work with your husband, Brian, which we didn’t talk about so much, but he’s a filmmaker, psychologist as well, and your partnership is an incredible part of your life as well. So we’ll pop the links to Meredith’s key work in the show notes and thanks everyone for listening and thanks so much Meredith.

About Meredith Fuller

Meredith’s website: https://meredithfuller.com.au/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mfpsy/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fuller.walsh

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-fuller-8075a110/

Links to explore:

Book Club: Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – open for enrolment now – join us for January 19/20 book club start.

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

Other free resources: https://www.quietwriting.com/free-resources/

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

The Writing Road Trip – a community program with Beth Cregan – kicking off Jan 2022

Connect on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingquietly/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/writingquietly

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terri-connellan/

intuition

Extraverted Intuition – Imagining the Possibilities

June 30, 2021

This article explores what it’s like for those who rely on Extraverted Intuition as a preferred cognitive process and what we can learn from this.

In a previous post, I wrote about Introverted Intuition as my preferred cognitive function as an INTJ personality type. Given my orientation, it’s no surprise I tend to see intuition as an internally driven and applied function. So I’ve been interested to find out more about what it’s like for those who rely more on Extraverted Intuition (abbreviated as Ne) as a dominant way of operating. I share my learning and insights on intuition as an extraverted perceiving process to guide your own journey whatever your personality type.

Extraverted Intuition and your type

If you identify as an ENTP or ENFP personality type, Extraverted Intuition is typically your dominant function; if you identify as an INTP or INFP, it’s your auxiliary function; for ESFJ and ESTJ types, it’s the tertiary function and for ISTJ and ISFJ types, it’s the inferior function. And it plays out in some way for all types. If you don’t know your type, it’s not a huge issue; if the words ‘Extraverted Intuition’ speak to you, chances are they are natural preferences for you or areas on your radar for development.

For example, you might be someone who perceives via a preference for Introverted Intuition, but is keen to mix this up with more external influences. There is much to be gained from learning about our less preferred cognitive processes so we can be well-rounded and operate in different ways.

Extraversion and Intuition

With an increased focus on introversion in recent times as a counterbalance to what Susan Cain calls ‘The Extrovert Ideal’, it’s possible that intuition has also become more synonymous with internal processes. But intuition can be driven just as much by external data as internal data.

Extraverted Intuition as a function specialises in drawing information across a range of contexts. It might be people, conversations, ideas, facts, history, perceptions or theories. Everything in the external environment is grist for the mill for this mode of intuitive processing.

In a recent conversation with a friend whose dominant function is Extraverted Intuition, he commented, “I love brainstorming”. As an INTJ, whose dominant function is Introverted Intuition, I responded, ‘I do too, but only by myself.’ It was quite a funny exchange and we both laughed. This highlights how we are both intuitive souls but that our main modus operandi is different. The Extraverted Intuitive focus is more expansive about possibilities and patterns in the external world and welcomes diverse inputs. An Introverted Intuitive’s focus is much more intensive, interested in deep, internal and symbolic connections, often generated when in solitude.

What Carl Jung says

It’s important to return to Dr. Carl Jung for insights as the source, given he conceptualised the eight functions based on his work with patients. In his 1921 book, Psychological Types, Jung explains the main characteristics of the Extraverted Intuitive function as:

…always present where possibilities exist. He has a keen nose for things in the bud pregnant with future promise. He can never exist in stable, long-established conditions of generally acknowledged though limited value: because his eye is constantly ranging for new possibilities, stable conditions have an air of impending suffocation.

The Extraverted Intuitive does not like stability and tires of objects or ideas when they become more clearly pinned down. It’s almost as if ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ and once this happens, a search is on for something new with potential not as yet defined.

But Jung explains of the Extraverted Intuitive: ‘As long as a possibility exists, the intuitive is bound to it with thongs of fate.’

So what is Extraverted Intuition?

So how does this play out in the real world? Extraverted Intuition works primarily by scanning the external landscape for input. There is a focus on gathering possibilities and applying them to find solutions to impact the external world. There’s also an emphasis on patterns and linkages in a constant search to make things better.

The similarity with Introverted Intuition is an ability to see connections and associations but the filter is different. For the Introverted type, they work intensively through their rich inner world. For the Extraverted type, the input device and filter is people, multi-tasking, and the external world. Both types might not always know how they got from A to B as they both rely on an intuitive, wide, scope of patterned input over time. They only know the end result of the sequence.

The Extraverted Intuitive function has been described as ‘Exploring Possibilities’, by Mary McGuiness in You’ve Got Personality and as ‘The Brainstormer’, in Gary Hartzler and Margaret Hartzler’s Functions of Type: Activities to Develop the Eight Jungian Functions.

The neuroscience of Extraverted Intuition

Dario Nardi has applied neuroscience to see how the neocortex of the brain works for different personality type preferences. In his book, Neuroscience of Personality, he describes Extraverted Intuiting as a tendency to ‘perceive and play with patterns of relationships across contexts’. People with this dominant function often show a ‘Christmas tree’ pattern as the neocortex is active all over. Each region does its own work with the brain responding to stimuli across multiple regions, even ones that seem unrelated.

The excitement for this type comes from forming opportunities across multiple areas in ‘trans-contextual thinking’. Nardi explains that Extraverted Intuiting types ‘often experience creative highs. The Christmas tree pattern is a creative engine.’ Given all this energy and responsiveness, this type can also experience ‘creative hangovers’. It’s like a huge ideas party with so many shiny, bouncing parts which can take its toll. But all those lights represent rich inputs to the imagination. Extraverted Intuiting has the potential to ignite some truly revolutionary and entrepreneurial thoughts through this cognitive process.

Ways Extraverted Intuition manifests

Here are some practical ways Extraverted Intuition can manifest:

A love of brainstorming

The act of generating possibilities is a lifeblood for personalities where the Extraverted Intuitive dominates. Ideally, the input is via a broad range of angles such as a group of people to maximise the environmental scan. Mind-mapping is also a valuable tool, enabling the visual capture of patterns and relationships.

Brainstorming enables new solutions and options through the ability to see interrelationships. A search for gaps and ways to address them are tools the Extraverted Intuitive will use as part of the process or outcome of brainstorming. Seeking positive change is a focus.

Comfortable with change

The types which feature Extraverted Intuition as a dominant function, ENTP and ENFP, are very comfortable with change. They make excellent entrepreneurs, facilitators and change managers as they thrive on multiple options in an environment of possibility. People who prefer Extraverted Intuition excel at working with scenarios of what ‘could be’ and envisioning the most positive state and how to get there. They are change agents, able to motivate and mentor others to see change as a positive. Their ability to tolerate ambiguity and focus on options means they can be very good at facilitating teams to resolve issues.

Motivated by learning across diverse areas

People with a preference for Extraverted Intuiting love to have a constant flow of fresh ideas, motivated by what the external world influences in the imagination. Avid lifelong learners, they seek the new and integrate it, reworking concepts in useful ways. Learning across diverse areas, depending on their auxiliary and other functions, they love to explore connections. They value learning that is intellectually challenging and interactive to maximise the external input.

The challenges and balancing of Extraverted Intuition

Just as with all the functions, there are challenges in being extraverted and intuitive. You can easily become bored if there is not enough new information coming through. You might jump from one new idea to another to keep the novelty factor high and increase the enthusiasm. Starting things off is easy; being a finisher and completer is less satisfying.

A fascinating comment by Dario Nardi in Neuroscience of Personality is that:

Ne types can find zen, but only after practicing and internalising an activity over weeks, months, or years….The irony is that Ne types, who have some the shortest attention spans, require laborious practice in order to find inner peace.

So this balance is likely to take some learning and practice in persistence, especially in being aware of what to do when the newness of an activity wears off.

To balance the extremes, it’s useful to bring in some of the opposite functions, especially Introverted Sensing (Si), Extraverted Sensing (Se) and Introverted Intuition (Ni). This includes:

accepting that some things won’t change;
doing maintenance or routine work;
extending visionary timeframes; and
being in the sensory here and now and not the imagination.

Ways to work with Extraverted Intuition

Whatever your type and dominant function, you can learn to integrate Extraverted Intuiting approaches into your life. This can help with seeing possibilities and facilitating change.

Here are some practices for developing and applying Extraverted Intuition based on my perceptions, fleshed out with concepts from Functions of Type: Activities to Develop the Eight Jungian Functions by Gary Hartzler and Margaret Hartzler. This book has excellent practical examples of activities to develop all the eight Jungian functions.

Ideas for developing Extraverted Intuition include:

Value external input for generating options:

Learn from those who favour Extraverted Intuition about the value of scanning the external landscape to ignite innovative solutions.
Brainstorm with other people, testing your own mind-mapping or brain-storming with others.
Stretch yourself by seeing how many solutions you can generate for a problem in the external world. This promotes a possibility mindset.

Practice looking for gaps:

In problem-solving situations, practice looking for the gaps to generate new perspectives.
Imagine different states such as ‘My Ideal Day’ to work out what might be missing. This can be a way of identifying desired situations so you can work towards them.

Focus on creating practical possibilities:

Identify opportunities for new products and services. Think of innovative ways to offer them that might provide additional income. If you feel resistant, identify what’s stopping you.
Work in an accountability group for external support as you try new ways of working and creating.

Look for the positive and improved:

Think of how you could do things differently if something didn’t go as planned.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘For everything you have missed in life, you have gained something else.‘ Identify where this has applied for positive perspectives.
Try to do what has become routine differently and reflect on this.

Final thoughts

Extraversion and intuition working together can bring new patterns in connections and relationships that provide real-world change. Maximising potential, openness, and entrepreneurial spirit are among its gifts. It is powerful to learn to work with its possibilities whether it is a strong preference or a less natural one.

I hope these insights are valuable for exercising your Extraverted Intuiting muscle to bridge options and generate opportunities. This includes innovative ways of solving challenging problems, even those on a global dimension. Certainly, the cognitive processes that the Extraverted Intuitive type excels in the potential to do exactly that.

troverted Intuition: Learning from its Mystery

Introverted and extraverted intuition – how to make intuition a strong practice

Intuition, writing and work: eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

Personality Stories Coaching

How I fulfilled my vision to become a Personality Type Coach

About Terri Connellan

Terri Connellan is a certified life coach, author and accredited psychological type practitioner. She has a Master of Arts in Language and Literacy, two teaching qualifications and a successful 30-year career as a teacher and a leader in adult vocational education. Her coaching and writing focus on three elements—creativity, personality and self-leadership—especially for women in transition to a life with deeper purpose. Terri works with women globally through her creative business, Quiet Writing, encouraging deeper self-understanding of body of work, creativity and psychological type for more wholehearted and fulfilling lives. Her book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the accompanying Wholehearted Companion Workbook were published in September 2021 by the kind press. She lives and writes in the outskirts of Sydney surrounded by beach and bush.

How to connect with me

Join my mailing list and receive your free Chapter 1 of Wholehearted or my Personal Action Checklist for more Meaning and Purpose. Just click on the link to choose and it will be with you in no time plus I’ll be in touch with inspirational insights and offers.

Book your Self-leadership Discovery Call with Terri here.

Connect on social media – link via the icons in the menu bar above! I especially Instagram.

Read Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Want to learn more about personality, creativity and self-leadership for positive transition to the life you desire?

Head over to read about my book Wholehearted and the accompanying Companion Workbook now.

Available in paperback and ebook from retailers listed here:

Wholehearted

Companion Workbook

coaching personality and story

Learned Wisdom: Journeys in Type and Transition

April 19, 2019

I’ve been so thrilled to attend and present at the British Association for Psychological Type (BAPT) Conference in Milton Keynes in the UK last week.⁣⠀

⁣The theme of the conference was ‘Pearls of Wisdom’, celebrating BAPT’s 30th anniversary. A perfect theme for me to engage with.

When I knew I would be heading over to attend, I was very drawn to submit to present. I developed up a submission to present a session on ‘Learned Wisdom: Journeys in Type and Transition‘. And I was so excited when my submission was accepted.⁣⠀

Learned Wisdom + stepping up in my professional practice

Here’s what I spoke about and shared:⁣⠀

how having a framework including psychological type can help us positively manage times of transition and major change.⁣⠀
my learned wisdom, using myself as a case study, reflecting on the last few years of transitioning to self-employment as a life coach and psychological type practitioner⁣⠀
a model I created for managing transition with psychological type, body of work and self-leadership as key aspects.⁣⠀
a practical way to apply this model to personally and professionally negotiate major transitions.

The experience of sharing learned wisdom

I spent many hours drawing together my personal and professional experiences and learning, and crafting and trialling the presentation in Sydney. Following my presentation, I was honoured to receive very positive feedback about the insights gained from my presentation. This was from attendees with many years of psychological type experience. ⁣⠀

Sometimes we wonder about all the hours we put into something like this. But for me, this was such valuable work in so many ways.

Firstly, I stopped to pull together the story of my transition over the past 2 plus years in a very deep way. Then I put it into a ‘learned wisdom’ framework, a model, that incorporated a number of aspects:

definitions of learned wisdom
looking at transition and change and the differences between them
reviewing my personal journey as a case study
creating a model for others to use personally and professionally with three key elements: body of work, personality type and self-leadership
situating this within a personal transition framework.

And in all of this, I stepped up into my work in new ways as a speaker and a personality type practitioner. This was in the context of presenting to a highly skilled and experienced group of type professionals. It was the kind of pressure that makes us grow and stretch in new ways and realise what we have learned. It’s the kind of pressure too we often wonder about putting ourselves under! But I am so pleased I did. I focused on being a contributor, not a guru – as Denise Duffield Thomas encourages us. With this mindset shift, I’ve gained confidence and learned tips to help with similar experiences in the future. I look forward to sharing this learning with you too.

Reflections on sharing learned wisdom further

I’m reflecting further on the process and experience in line with my INTJ type preference! I know that I have a body of work to share in many ways, via coaching, writing and social media. I am:

➡️ creating a Learned Wisdom mini-course where I take you through how type can be a support during times of transition and look at your type transition compass.

➡️ sharing the information via Sacred Creative Collective group coaching and Personality Type coaching, where I support people to identify their best-fit type and learn about personality preferences.⁣⠀

➡️ sharing about the experience of stepping up in new ways in our work in the world including pushing through the upper limit problem we often impose on ourselves.

➡️ sharing the learning in different ways via blog posts and social media

Next steps in learned wisdom

So look forward to more instalments about Learned Wisdom. And check out Personality Stories Coaching via the link in my profile for more information. I welcome any questions or suggestions you might have!

Quiet Writing is on Facebook Instagram and Twitter so keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

You might also enjoy:

Personality Stories

How I fulfilled my vision to become a Personality Type Coach

Never too old – finding courage and skill to empower your dreams

Life Coaching – making meaning in times of transition

Shining a quiet light – working the gifts of introversion

Personality skills including how to be the best you can be as an introvert in recruitment

Being a vessel – or working with introverted intuition

personality and story reading notes transcending

Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences – a review of ‘The Power of NOTEs’ by Nicole Gruel, PhD

January 18, 2019

Want to learn more about Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences? ‘The Power of NOTEs’ will help you understand and work with them as a source for transformation. Read on!

NOTEs are an important aspect of the human experience that help point towards and awaken the desire, curiosity, and courage to explore more of what life could be.

from The Power of NOTEs by Nicole Gruel PhD

Nicole Gruel PhD

Have you ever experienced something that felt out of the ordinary, super-charged or transcendent, that changed your life in some key way?

Many of us have, yet it’s an area of human experience we tend not to talk about. Often this is because we don’t quite understand what happened. We keep quiet, often for years, as we try to make sense of it and what it meant. It’s frequently a solitary, and sometimes, painful journey. But more people are beginning to talk about these non-ordinary transcendent experiences however they manifest. They are emerging as sources of positive transformation and personal power if we pay attention, talk about them and work through them.

Dr Nicole Gruel’s new book, ‘The Power of NOTEs: How Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences Transform the Way We Live, Love and Lead‘ is an important, research-based contribution to the field of spiritual psychology and transformation.

After a near-death experience and the sudden loss of family members, Nicole found herself deep in the realm of non-ordinary transcendent experiences. In particular, she learnt their power for positive change.

Nicole has gone on to explore NOTEs deeply including via PhD studies. Her Doctoral Dissertation focused on “AfterNOTEs: Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences and their Aftereffects Through Jung’s Topology”. This involved interviewing people who had experienced NOTES and working through the psychological dimensions of their response. This deep qualitative and quantitative research, combined with personal experience and NOTEs community connection, provides the rich source material that this excellent, practical book is woven around.

So what are NOTEs?

A non-ordinary transcendent experience is a rare and unfamiliar event that takes you beyond your regular understanding of yourself and the world.

from The Power of NOTES

An acronym created by transpersonal psychologist William Braud, ‘NOTE’ captures experiences at the intersection of “paranormal research, exceptional human experiences, and transpersonal psychology.” (p3). Well-known examples include near-death experiences and paranormal encounters, but the scope of NOTEs is much wider and more inclusive than this.

Nicole explains in the opening chapter that there are over 500 potential NOTEs that can be grouped into nine categories such as Death-related experiences, Encounter experiences and Mystical experiences. Each category of NOTEs is described helping the reader to begin to connect with their own personal database of experiences.

What is the power of NOTEs?

The power of NOTEs is realising their potential for our growth and insight. Nicole explains the ability of NOTEs to take us out of ourselves and our habitual ways of being:

For many experiencers, tasting our core self is the greatest gift of a NOTE. (p7)

It is a type of disruption forcing our attention in new ways and often taking some time to integrate. This is often because societal and cultural contexts make it hard for us to talk about them. Nicole explores this with examples from the lives of experiencers. She shows too that NOTEs offer wisdom and insight that has implications beyond the individual.

Greater wisdom calls for us to access the insights of NOTEs as best we can, for these experiences provide a necessary lens into other ways of seeing and being in the world. (p9)

Moreover, research shows that when people share NOTEs, it has many benefits for individual wellbeing such as reducing stress. Nicole has made it her mission to help people share and understand NOTEs as part of the human and collective experience.

The landscape of NOTEs

I had the pleasure of attending the online launch of Nicole’s book recently where we had a virtual tour through the book. We also heard from leaders and writers in the NOTEs community. These experiences, alongside reading the book, have helped me better understand the landscape of NOTEs.

The book explores NOTEs from all perspectives including the dark and light sides of being an experiencer as well as from the viewpoint of neuroscience. Nicole scopes neuroscience perspectives and evidence that shows we are hard-wired to experience NOTEs.

A fellow personality type practitioner, Nicole also looks through the personality lens at the gifts of NOTEs:

NOTEs are powerful because they put us on the fast track toward a fuller expression of who we most naturally and uniquely are.

Research shows that the specific content of a near-death experience, its impact and significance is influenced by people’s personal psychology.

Connecting NOTEs experiences with Jung’s eight psychological types, Nicole explores eight gifts or transcendent dimensions of personality using James Graham Johnston’s model of the Gift’s Compass™. For example, Introverted Thinking (Ti) connects with The Conceptual Gift.

Using this lens of personality, Nicole explains that:

Experiencer stories show that the more the natural or true self is made available through NOTEs, the more a person’s dominant personality preferences take on transcendent aspects. (p40)

This ground-breaking perspective, informed by conversations with NOTEs experiencers, helps provide psychological insights into these transcendent events.

Working and transforming with NOTEs

The second half of the book explores NOTEs as clues to our natural flow states; ways to work with NOTEs during and beyond experiences; and how NOTEs can be a transformative power in how we live, love and lead.

Each chapter provides practical tips and practices for working with NOTEs as a transformative power source. Nicole shows how we can create a NOTEs biography and Well-being Wheel, with these tools based on recent, pioneering research and experiences of people actively working on integrating NOTEs into life stories. The importance of validating and appropriately sharing NOTEs is demonstrated in a self-leadership framework:

Ultimately, no one is a better coach and guide for you than you. (p62)

The power of love and legacy are keys to the self-leadership experience of working with NOTEs in a personally transformative way.

The experience of reading The Power of NOTEs

I encourage you to read The Power of NOTEs. It is beautifully and clearly written, full of lived and researched wisdom. As Katie Mottram puts it so well in her foreword:

This is not just a book; Nicole has gifted you an experience.

I couldn’t agree more. As if to highlight this, I had my own transcendent experience during my reading of the book.

I realised my experiences of NOTEs are mostly in the Encounter experiences category: a kind of synchronicity related to “something wondrous or awesome, like a spectacular view or moving music...” Many years ago, I had a series of astounding synchronistic events with rainbows at a peak time of change and transformation. They had a profound effect on me as rainbow after rainbow connected in an ongoing narrative.

I started Nicole’s book in the early morning hours of a sleepless night two days away from Christmas, the first anniversary of my mother’s death. A few hours later, still restless, I got up early and headed out to the deck. There I was greeted by the most stunning rainbow in the sky. Rainbows are something I connect with my mother and also my father. I chose songs and poems with the symbolism of rainbows for both their funerals as a way of continuing to connect with them.

My experience of reading the book, reflecting on my own NOTEs symbolism, seemed to open up this connection. It would have been so easy to miss this rainbow.

Connecting with the power of NOTEs

Reading this book will help you connect with the power of NOTEs in your life. As the ‘Praise’ upfront in the book, the Foreword and the online book launch all show, there is a groundswell of research, interest and support in the area of non-ordinary transcendent experiences.

Organisations such as the International Spiritual Emergence Network (ISEN), American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE), the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) and the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) provide a touchpoint for experiences and research around them. You can find further links and information here.

More authors are stepping up to write their stories and gather, honour and structure the experiences of others as Nicole has done. My next book review (coming week of 11 February) is of Mystical Interludes II – a Collection of Ordinary People’s Mystical Experiences, collected and edited by Emily Rodavich. The Power of NOTES and Mystical Interludes II came to me in a synchronistic way, at the same time from different connections but covering similar terrain.

Read Nicole Gruel’s book to recognise, honour and structure such experiences in your life and also in the lives of those you love. If you have had a NOTE, this book can help others share in and understand your experience. Likewise, if you think someone you know may have experienced a NOTE, this book is a useful way to open the conversation or quietly support them. For counsellors, coaches and other professional people, this is an important resource to open up thoughts about spiritually transformative experiences in the context of practice.

And as I finish writing, I hear the sounds of the children next door playing under the water sprinkler in the Sydney midsummer heat. One excitedly shouts: “There’s a rainbow!”

Book Giveaway

I’m hosting a giveaway for the Full Moon + Blood Moon/total Lunar eclipse (21 January Southern Hemisphere time) on Instagram to celebrate the launch of ‘The Power of NOTEs’.

As Tanishka, the Moon Woman shares:

this full moon eclipse is a wonderful portal to invoke the energies of Kali Ma, the archetypal dark mother who helps us own our shadow & pray for a complete transformation – both personally & for the collective.

It seems so appropriate! I have two signed copies of Nicole Gruel’s ‘The Power of NOTEs‘ to give away. So there’s a chance for two lucky winners to win a copy, sent to you anywhere in the world.

So make sure you are following me on Instagram and follow the instructions on Monday 21 January AEDT. Good luck!

Thought pieces + footnotes

Dr Nicole Gruel is an author, speaker and transformational coach. Descendant from a long line of samurai, she has spent over two decades exploring human potential. You can connect with her at DrNicoleGruel.com.

The Power of NOTES was provided as a review copy by the author in return for a fair review. I am grateful to Dr Nicole Gruel for sharing this book with me.

To purchase, you can use the below Amazon affiliate links if you choose. There is no additional cost to you. I receive a small commission to help keep Quiet Writing efforts, book reviews and giveaways flourishing.

For Amazon.com.au:

The Power of NOTEs: Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences Transforming the Way We Live, Love, and Lead

For Amazon.com:

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You can also get a signed copy here direct from Nicole.

Image 1 (feature image), 2 & 5 provided by Nicole Gruel and used with permission and thanks.

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NOTEs are an important aspect of the human experience that help point towards and awaken the desire, curiosity, and courage to explore more of what life could be.

So what are NOTEs?

What is the power of NOTEs?

The landscape of NOTEs

Working and transforming with NOTEs

The experience of reading The Power of NOTEs

Connecting with the power of NOTEs